Designer creations - deaths of Princess Diana and Gianni Versace

ArtForum, Dec, 1997 by Homi K. Bhabha

But there is another side to such gestures of public virtue. The effulgent sentimentality that turned the princess at one moment into the savior of a people made frigid by Tory rule, and at another, the guardian angel of a people set free by the "social marketeers" of New Labour, does little justice to the complexities involved in constructing such an image. In the orgiastic baring of the British soul that followed her death, Diana has been symbolized and sentimentalized out of existence. Her greatest achievement was to craft an "image" for herself; against the longest personal and political odds she established her own style of agency: a public presence signifying survival and ressentiment, frailty and feistiness, anorexia and an enormous appetite for life. The "people's princess" and her friend the couturier were linked in their shared concern to change the "look" of their times, and the public gaze that goes with it. Diana was no less concerned with her "market" than Versace was with his, as New Yorker editor Tina Brown immediately picked up during her June 1997 tete & tete with the princess (relayed in the September 15 issue): "She understands that in marketing terms the Windsors are a decaying brand, one that requires repositioning by a media genius. . . . 'I tried again and again to get them to hire someone . . . to give them proper advice, but they didn't want to hear it,' she says. 'They kept saying I was manipulative. But what's the alternative? To just sit there and have them make your image for you?'"

Diana's interest in the (re)presentation of herself as image is not to be read merely as a narcissistic act of self-projection. (Of course, one man's progress to power is another woman's crafty manipulation.) Salman Rushdie, in The New Yorker, saw through the empty charges of manipulation to the intelligence that lay behind the mythmaking, when he wrote: "Diana was not given to using words like 'semiotics' but she was a capable semiotician of herself." In defining a role for herself, Diana had to create a constituency, and appeal to a sector of the nation's "imagined community" - a people - who, like her, were struggling to find a representative and representational image for themselves, a "sign" of public belonging, as well as an insignia of authority. Elton John got it just right in attributing Diana's saving grace to her gift for ministering to "those whose lives were torn apart." A tawdry advertisement in The New York Times Magazine - she is depicted wearing her auctioned-off gowns in a set of commemorative stamps, official postage in the republic of Togo - said much the same thing. The "essence" of Diana's virtue, the ad reads, was seen in her "embracing the plight of society's so-called 'untouchables,' such as: sick and handicapped children; the homeless; battered women; victims of terminal disease; victims of anti-personnel landmines." Jogging mythical memory reveals, of course, that the Roman cult of Diana - goddess of the chase - was explicitly connected with the lower classes, plebians and slaves, who were responsible for her elevation into the pantheon. (Such a distant echo betWeen the Dianas develops a macabre significance when we realize that the goddess' festival is traditionally held on the Ides of August, and it was at the end of that very month that the princess' death led to her adoring apotheosis.) Her own sovereignty somewhat sullied, the princess of Wales chose as her "people" those who had an attenuated, even marginal, relation to the well-established lobbies of the (declining) welfare state. Her affiliative community, in the realms of public concern and communication, was not limited to the victims of social inequity traditionally contained within the platform and prerogative of national politics - the unemployed, the working classes. Her concern for AIDS victims, and those who were threatened, life and limb, by the presence of landmines, gave her an international demesne and a cosmopolitan appeal that the royal family had stoutly resisted.