Princess Diana Wouldn’t Wear Heels Higher Than Two Inches During Her Marriage Because of Prince Charles’ Ego

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 7 May 2022

Prince Charles and Princess Diana stood eye to eye, each at 5’10’’—and because of Charles’ ego, Diana refused to wear shoes higher than two inches during their marriage, a new book claims.

In this summer’s new release The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes, Eloise Moran delves into the fashion icon’s style evolution, writing “for years, Diana wore shoes no higher than two inches out of respect to her husband’s ego,” per Insider. (You might know Moran from her Lady Di Revenge Looks Instagram account, which has amassed 118,000 followers and zooms in specifically on Diana’s looks post-divorce.)

But during her marriage, Diana’s heels were short, which Moran dissects by looking specifically at an outfit the late Princess of Wales wore to pick up Charles from Cirencester Hospital after he broke his arm in 1990.

“Diana styled an unbuttoned chambray shirt over a casual white T-shirt and wore it with a floral knee-length skirt and coordinating, but not quite matching, flat shoes,” she writes, calling it a “predivorce revenge look.”

As Diana’s style evolved through her years in the spotlight—from marrying the Prince of Wales in 1981 until her untimely death in 1997—“as the estranged royal’s confidence grew, so did her heels,” Moran writes of Diana. “Jimmy Choo recalled that at the start of their seven-year friendship, Diana always ordered flats, then, as her marriage started to crumble, the heels got higher. ‘First she went up to two inches, then three inches, then three ½ inches, then three ¾ inches. They just kept creeping up and up,’ said Choo.”

Choo, writes Moran, was a close confidante of Diana’s, who was a “great fan” of his 1990s designs.

“He often joined her at Kensington Palace, where they’d rummage through samples and collaborate on her next pairs,” she writes.

Choo heartbreakingly even had a pair of pumps ready to deliver to Diana upon her return from her August 1997 trip to Paris, where she was ultimately killed in a car accident.

“She tragically never got to receive them, and Jimmy kept them in his personal collection in remembrance of his friend and best client,” Moran writes.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.