AIBU - Princess Diana new statue

[ForeverAintEnough3]

She was a style icon yet she’s in one of those frumpy waist belts that were only in fashion briefly. The face does nothing to represent how beautiful she was. It’s too harsh.

(ʎllɐǝɹ ʇou) ¡ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ uᴉ ɯ,I

She was stunning (and I wasn’t a big fan). Look at the life in these photos. The statue is a travesty.

@awaynboilyurheid

Not horsey at all, have you muddled her up with Princess Anne? She was stunning and had amazing style.

She had amazing stylists, anyone with money can have people picking their wardrobe and suggesting outfits, which I’m sure makes it incredibly easy to wear the right clothes.

She also had all the time in the world to go to the gym. Had her own make up person. The best hairdresser. Enough money to buy decent food. Enough money to waste spend on alternative therapies like colonic irrigation.....

The photo of Diana, second from left on the top line is stunning.
She wasn't conventionally beautiful, but like Princess Maxima of the Netherlands now, she had the wow factor - photogenic, tall, her ability to interact with people - warmth.

I think she knew how to charm and used it to her advantage for the most part. It didn't work so well on the press in the end, but in general she made it work.

I would imagine she had her faults too (well, we know she did).

Who doesn't?

So much has always been made of Diana’s looks though, I wonder if it was healthy to fixate on that. I was a young teen when she died. I remember on the Diana was always described as being young and beautiful compared to ugly old Camila. When I saw a picture of Camila I was surprised because she didn’t look ugly at all. Getting older would have been so tough for lady Di.

Nothing has changed before or after.
Prince Andrew was always the handsome one and Charles the ugly one. Princess Anne was noted for her looks. Even Margaret and Elizabeth were compared. Same with Diana and Sarah Ferguson.

The media, and the public alike, love to cast people as pantomime villains or goodies. There is an unhealthy appetite for elevating people only to cut them down.
We made her larger than life and chose to cast her as beautiful. In truth she was just a woman, born into a privileged life but constrained by it too. She had what all humans have... Good and bad traits, public and private faces, and the same insecurities we all harbour.

None of us knew her, but we talk about her as though we did.

@OutwiththeOutCrowd

www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/2016050531261/prince-harry-not-many-memories-princess-diana/

The trauma of Diana's death may have erased some of his earlier recollections or consigned them to an unreachable part of the subconscious. It's hard to say how it happened but he does claim in an interview not to have many memories.

And in general, I have noted that the vividness with which people remember their childhoods can vary considerably.

I found my father's death quite traumatic, that isn't unique to Harry.

@OutwiththeOutCrowd

The proportions of the children is interesting. It so happen that the sculptor was working on a piece depicting Licoricia of Winchester, a medieval woman, around the same time (pic 1 - Licoricia by the same sculptor). He has certainly chosen similar proportions for the child in that work, reflecting the medieval aesthetic, which tended to show babies and children looking like small adults (pic 2 - medieval art).

It’s tempting to wonder whether there was some cross-fertilisation of ideas and if the sculptor hadn’t been in a medieval mindset, the children might have looked different.

Pure speculation on my part, of course. I’d love to ask the sculptor!

This is so interesting @outwiththeoutcrowd - looking at that photo I think he has made the Licoricia statue again - similar posture, facial style, kiddie gesturing to the distance, even the low-riding belt. It works for Licoricia but not for Diana.

I’m staggered by people saying Diana was “normal” and “not conventionally beautiful”. She was regarded as entirely meeting Western conventional beauty standards, besides becoming very glamorous as she grew up.

Diana was very nice looking, but other than being tall and thin she wasn’t a classic beauty in terms of facial features as her nose would be considered too big. She always looked a bit older and sometimes has a more manly figure. However It seems unkind to list them here. She was made out to be more incredible than she was and I think this actually made things harder for her. So maybe the ordinary statue is ok after all.

Whilst I would agree that Diana may not have been a classical beauty stairway - her features were perhaps too strong - her face did actually come close to the classical ideal as determined by computerised facial mapping.

Artists tend to flatter their subjects. Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear has been their stock in trade historically. Recently, there have been naturalistic artists who let a sow's ear be represented as such.

But I think this is the first time I have come across a commissioned artwork in which a silk purse as muse is turned into a sow's ear!

Just my opinion.

she wasn’t a classic beauty in terms of facial features as her nose would be considered too big.

I agree, but I think you have to put it in context. Apart from rich Americans, very very few people ever got cosmetic surgery to iron out their imperfections back in the 80s and early 90s. Botox didn't exist, neither did fillers, perfect capped teeth were only for Americans, nose jobs and boob jobs were a thing, but had she had anything like that after becoming probably THE most recognised woman on the planet, the scrutiny and criticism for it would never have let up. It would have been a very, very unroyal thing to do indeed and would have set her apart from the establishment even more than she already was.

Lots of women are considered beautiful even though they don't have perfect or uniform features and may not even be the 'prettiest' woman around, because they possess a certain quailty that others find quite mesmerising to look at. I think Diana fell into that category.Whatever it was she had, at least we know it was exactly what she was born with, which is more than can be said for most high profile 'beauties' today.

Yes, beauty in real people is always tilted slightly away from symmetry and textbook perfection. If Diana had been a perfect illustration of the ideal, she would also have been bland, bland, bland!

People find different things beautiful though. I think she was stunning in a way but didn’t have what I’d consider a beautiful face. Diana had such a fan base though, so not considering her as beautiful is almost sacrilegious.

She was beautiful for what she did.

When I think of the strongest image of Princess Diana, it’s her walking through the field of land mines with her face shield. It’s such an awful problem and it was fantastic she got involved. I’d loved to have seen something like that captured in the statue.

@stairway

Diana was very nice looking, but other than being tall and thin she wasn’t a classic beauty in terms of facial features as her nose would be considered too big. She always looked a bit older and sometimes has a more manly figure. However It seems unkind to list them here. She was made out to be more incredible than she was and I think this actually made things harder for her. So maybe the ordinary statue is ok after all.

It is all a bit unreal isn't it. I mean to Harry and William she was a real person, to "her" public she was this mythical creature. A bit like her wedding dress which is still described as so wonderful, so beautiful when in fact it wasn't great at all. Fergie's dress was much nicer but never gets mentioned. It is weird. It's all a bit The Emperor's New Clothes. Why can't people accept she was a nice looking woman, she did some great things she did some pretty horrible things.

Yes Diana had a fairly large nose and I think it was a bit bent, what do people want? A Barbie doll? She was a real woman and good that her sons recognise that and celebrate it.

I hope at least that the sculptor does not now consider the commission to have been a poisoned chalice. There has been such a backlash. He is undoubtedly talented but his job was a difficult one. There are so many different opinions on whether Diana was a significant figure or not, and if so, what the nature of that significance was. A choice in depicting her a certain way was never going to please everyone.

There were two brothers, a statue committee and a sculptor involved in deciding on a design. Sometimes the best artistic outcome doesn't arise out of consensus. You end up with something 'safe'.

I do think societies need myths and heroes though. It's human nature to cast around for role models and inspiration. So I understand people wanting an idealised representation of Diana with more emotional impact.

That those involved in creating the statue have ended up downplaying even her actual beauty and, moreover, the scope of her interests and work, by settling on a domestic tableau with children, has rather surprised me. Perhaps they were very keen to minimise the risk of the statue becoming a shrine.

Perhaps her sons actually liked the idea of a domestic tableau with children.

It doesn't look very domestic to me - looks like she's marching them to borstal.

Maybe she’s leading them to heaven.

So it isn't glamorous enough, it isn't heroic enough, it isn't domestic enough. I think maybe the Princes should put it somewhere private and let everyone forget her.

I don't think the sculptor is being attacked for the choices around the setting, but for the fact that it actually doesn't look like its subject. That was the bit that was under his control.

Read the thread, she should have been walking through landmines, she should have been with her sons, she should have been glamorous in an iconic dress.