It was the Princess’s idea to call him for her Vogue cover. She’d seen his fashion pictures in the magazine, including one of Claudia Schiffer cupping her chin in her hands – and told her friend Liz Tilberis, then editor of British Vogue and a long-time collaborator and friend of Demarchelier’s, that she wanted some of that wattage. The results, in black and white, were indeed electrifying, not so much for any pyrotechnics, but rather the reverse: the way the pictures stripped back the royal trappings to reveal a woman who wasn’t just gorgeous, but sexy. The first stunner was the cover, showing the Princess not in one of her fussy necklines, but wearing a simple black polo, the height of fashion at that time – this was peak minimalism and American Vogue would feature a line-up of supermodels in Gap white shirts a year later. Inside was a sensational portrait of her in a white strapless dress and tiara.
With hair de-helmeted by Sam McKnight, make-up given the fashion-editorial treatment by Mary Greenwell (no more heavy blue kohl eyeliner) and a beguilingly mischievous twinkle in her eyes (perhaps Demarchelier had cracked one of his risque jokes, or maybe she knew that, in the tiara shots, she looked as though she was naked, wrapped in a sheet), she’s a million light years from the suffocating regal stiffness of all the other portraits she’d sat for.
For the first time in nine years, she looked her age, rather than much older – a modern, fashionable beauty. This was Diana not as a princess, but a star in her own right. Mission accomplished. How right she’d been to go with Demarchelier. As Anna Wintour put it: “Patrick takes simple photographs perfectly, which of course is immensely difficult. Working without ornate settings, often in black and white, he makes attractive women look beautiful, and beautiful women seem real.”
Contrast this set of photos with portraits taken of Diana over the previous decade, and you immediately see what a profound transformation Demarchelier wrought not just on her image, but on the entire Royal Family’s.
Pre-PD, Diana’s portraits were generally formal, slightly staid affairs, even when they were straining for something slightly more spontaneous, like the ones of her and Prince Charles taken with their two young sons – shot against majestic looking tapestries and wallpapers, or that 80s favourite, the mottled background. Diana, with her media antennae working overtime, sensed that the era of the supermodel required something altogether more polished and glamorous.
They didn’t come more polished and glam than Demarchelier, as I witnessed first hand in 1990 when I sat in on one of his shoots in New York.
