The 'Princess Diana story': Why everyone has their own version

Diana was given very little opportunity to be the storyteller of her own life

Two decades on from her death, Princess Diana has reentered the public imagination in two very different ways. First, as a style icon, a modern designer’s muse, and in a fashion exhibition at Kensington Palace. And second, as a documentary subject, in the widely publicised Diana, Our Mother and Diana, In Her Own Words.

These are all competing versions of “the Diana story”. The fashion icon status depoliticises her life (and death) to reposition her within consumer culture. The documentaries politicise her as a wife, mother and victim.

But who