Princess Diana Was “Very Distressed” Over the Death of Gianni Versace

• On July 22, 1997—28 years ago this week—Princess Diana flew to Milan, Italy to attend the funeral of designer Gianni Versace along with around 2,000 other mourners.
• In a poignant and heartbreaking image, Diana can be seen comforting friend Elton John at Versace’s funeral, no one knowing that within six weeks, he’d be performing “Candle in the Wind” at her own funeral after she was killed in a car accident on August 31 at just 36 years old.
• Diana wore a black Versace dress to the designer’s funeral, held one week after he was tragically killed on the front steps of his Miami Beach home.

It is a sobering image—a mourning Princess Diana comforting a weeping Elton John at the funeral of their mutual friend Gianni Versace on July 22, 1997, no one, of course, knowing that just six weeks later, Diana too would be dead following an August 31 car crash in Paris.

The former Princess of Wales naturally wore Versace to the designer’s funeral in Milan, attended by not just Diana and John but Naomi Campbell, Karl Lagerfeld, and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who herself would meet a tragic, untimely end in a plane crash just two years from the time of the funeral. Versace was murdered outside of his Miami Beach mansion on July 15, and in the immediate aftermath, “Diana was in tears and looked very distressed,” her former bodyguard Lee Sansum wrote in his 2022 book Protecting Diana about her reaction when told of Versace’s death. The Princess of Wales found out about her friend’s assassination while aboard the Jonikal yacht while having breakfast, and after learning of his fate asked Sansum, “Do you think they’ll do that to me?”

It was a question “that always stayed with me,” Sansum wrote, adding that Diana “was shaking” at the news.

Princess Diana on July 22, 1997.

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Diana had developed an affinity for Versace’s designs towards the end of her life, and she and the designer would dine with John when they all found themselves in London. Diana was first introduced to Versace by Anna Harvey, an editor at British Vogue who was Diana’s fashion mentor throughout her life as a royal. After seeing supermodel Campbell in a Versace creation, “Over the next several years, Gianni gradually became one of her favorite designers, although she often made him remove the gaudy medusas and overwrought details he piled on his clothes,” Deborah Ball wrote in her book House of Versace. “He gave her first pick of his couture collection and designed pieces exclusively for her that were classic but had a pinch of glamour.”

Princess Diana and Elton John at Gianni Versace’s funeral.

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Diana was on the cover of the July 1997 issue of Vanity Fair, and inside the magazine’s pages, Versace said of the Princess of Wales, “I had a fitting with her last week for new suits and clothing for spring, and she is so serene. It is a moment in her life, I think, when she’s found herself—the way she wants to live.” Neither Diana nor Versace would see spring 1998.

Sting, Anna Wintour, Trudi Styler, Karl Lagerfeld, and Princess Diana.

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“Gianna loved his London connections,” Sakai Lubnow, co-curator of the Gianni Versace Retrospective at The Arches in London Bridge, told Vogue. “And, I mean, there was no higher compliment in fashion than Princess Diana wearing your clothes.”

Lubnow said that Diana and Versace originally met in 1985 in Milan, “But it wasn’t until she was freed from royal protocol [after her separation from Prince Charles in 1992 and eventual divorce in 1996] that Gianni could begin shaping her image in earnest.”

Princess Diana in Versace in 1995.
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Princess Diana in Versace.

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Harvey, writing in an October 1997 commemorative British Vogue issue dedicated to Diana, said that the looks Versace designed for her were some of “her most successful looks to date.”

To his funeral nearly 28 years ago to the day, Diana wore a black Versace fall 1997 shift dress, pearls, and the so-called Diana handbag Versace made, a lesser-known counterbalance to the Lady Dior, also named in her honor.

Princess Diana on July 22, 1997.

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“It’s interesting,” Lubnow said. “That bag was never called the Diana bag by Gianni. The same with the so-called Bondage collection; Gianni called it Miss S&M. But these names come from collectors, fans, people who wear and love the pieces. That’s where the connection sticks.”

Princess Diana on July 22, 1997.

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Following Diana’s appearance at the Milan Cathedral on July 22, she traveled to Bosnia, where she continued to bring attention to her fight against landmines—a cause her son Prince Harry has supported as recently as this week in Angola—in a private visit on August 10. By the end of the summer, Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were on a cruise of the Mediterranean on his yacht; they traveled from the South of France to Sardinia before heading to Paris on August 30. Just after midnight, the two—along with chauffeur Henri Paul—were killed after a crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel; Diana was just 36. Suddenly, Diana went from being the mourner at Versace’s funeral to the mourned at her own September 6 funeral at Westminster Abbey—two lives cut far too short, forever united through fashion and the unbelievably tragic circumstances of their deaths 28 summers ago.