While fans are used to Kate Middleton channeling Princess Diana with her fashion, no one expected Queen Camilla, the wife of Diana’s ex-husband King Charles, to also pay homage to the late Princess of Wales.
Camilla channeled Diana at the Royal Ascot on June 21, where she wore a tunic dress with geometric embroidery, a floral wide-brimmed hat, and white pump heels. What was the most interesting, however, was that Camilla chose to accessorize her look with a Lady Dior handbag—a quilted top handle purse that was named after Princess Diana, who used to go by Lady Di.
The Lady Dior was designed by Gianfranco Ferré in 1994. and gifted to Diana by France’s then-first lady, Bernadette Chriac, in 1995. The bag was originally named the Chouchou or Princesse, however, after Diana was seen wearing it at several public engagements, Dior changed the handbag’s name to the Lady Dior in 1996.
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Photos of Camilla wearing the Lady Dior come almost 40 years afteer news broke of Charles and Camilla’s affair in 1986. (Camilla,at the time, was married to Andrew Parker Bowles.) Diana addressed rumors of the affair in her infamous BBC One Panorama interview in 1995. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” she said. Charles and Diana separated in 1992 before finalizing their divorce in 1996, a year before Diana’s death in a tragic car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997.
According to The Telegraph, an audiotape Diana made for her biographer, Andrew Morton (who wrote Diana: Her True Story
), revealed that Diana confronted Camilla about the affair at a party. “I know what’s going on between you and Charles and I just want you to know that. She said to me: ‘You’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got all the men in the world fall in love with you and you’ve got two beautiful children, what more do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want my husband.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way…and it must be hell for both of you. But I do know what’s going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot,’” she said in the tape.
Charles, for his part, spoke out about the rumors in a documentary in 1994. When asked about whether he had been “faithful and honorable” to Diana in their marriage, Charles told filmmakers, “Yes, yes…until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”
When asked about his relationship with Camilla, Charles maintained that the two were friends before their relationship became romantic. “She has been a friend for a very long time—and will continue to be a friend for a very long time,” he said.