Diana´s most prolific dress designer, the late
Catherine Walker, had absolutely no formal training in fashion design when, widowed with two small children, she began peddling clothes out of a basket in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. King´s Road, the main boulevard, is known for its atypical and pricy boutiques and is where Mary Quant´s mini-skirt first debutted in the 1960s. Catherine was to become "the" designer who launched Princess Diana from a shy, awkward, gangly girl to a 1980s and 90s fashion icon. On June 23, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.14 of
Diana´s dresses will go to auction at Waddington´s in Toronto, Canada. Diana herself, at the suggestion of her son, Prince William, offered these same dresses among the 79 original dresses that were auctioned off at Christie´s New York exactly 14 years ago, raising over 3 million British pounds (approx. US$3.6 million) for various AIDS and cancer charities. You can see the 14 dresses in detail online.
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Happier Times. L to R: Prince Harry, Diana
and future king of England, Prince William.
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Diana. Imperfect and emotional. So very human. Arguably the most loved princess in the history of the British Royal family. A Cinderella story gone awry, stripped of her royal title after the inevitable divorce from Prince Charles. Her flaws and misfortunes only made us love her more. She was "one of us". She was "The People´s Princess" and as stated by her brother in 1997 after a tragic accident took her life on the streets of Paris, "...she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic."
Update:
See here for auction results
Teens play a very big role in developing what will appear on next season's runways. "You really shouldn't talk down to teenagers. You should first educate yourself on what they like." This advice from Sharon Lee, professional "Cool Hunter". Field correspondents for the company she started with her partner Dee Dee Gordon communicate through the website and Facebook page with pictures, observations and opinions on what they are seeing every day. Teens also participate in surveys conducted by company and are at the forefront of developing new fashion trends each season as well as in the development of the new products for other companies. "We look for kids who are ahead of the pack, because they'll influence what all the other kids do. We look for the 20 percent, the trendsetters, who are going to influence the other 80 percent." The apparel design companies who use their services are in a never-ending race to be the first to launch the next new craze in fashion. On PBS Frontline: Hunting for Cool, Lee continues, explaining how trends spread:, "...it's a triangle. At the top of the triangle there's the innovator, which is like two to three percent of the population. Underneath them is the trend-setter, which we would say is about 17 percent. What they do is they pick up on ideas that the innovators are doing and they kind of claim them as their own. Underneath them is an early adopter, which is questionable exactly what their percentage is, but they kind of are the layer above mainstream, which is about 80 percent. And what they do is they take what the trend-setter is doing and they make it palatable for mass consumption. They take it, they tweak it, they make it more acceptable, and that's when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it and then it actually kills it." These days, by the time you get around to buying the "latest style", it's already on it's way out!
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