Talk about a royal mess.
The saleslady had simply had enough. As a clerk at the highly fashionable—and very expensive—fashion boutique, she had seen the type too many times to count. And she wasn’t in the mood to put up with it again.
Opened in 1953, Bellville Sassoon quickly became a “must” fashion house for the British glitterati. “We are the Chanel of London,” co-owner David Sassoon once immodestly boasted.
It catered to high-end celebrities, politicians, society figures, and royalty. Its many A-List clients included Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Margaret Thatcher, and Audrey Hepburn. Its designers were master practitioners of elegant design delivered with a sophisticated British flair, such as luxurious fabrics sewn with almost excruciating attention to tailoring down to the most minute detail. If you were a woman of stature hosting a garden party or a debutante being presented to society at a coming-out ball or any of a dozen other elegant situations, you wanted to wear Bellville Sassoon.
And now, late in the afternoon one day toward the end of February 1981, the sales clerk found herself stuck with a teenager ogling outfits. She was 19, painfully shy, unsure of herself or what she wanted. Her sandy hair was worn in a feathered style, layered and slightly tousled, spilling down onto her forehead until it almost resembled a sheepdog. Her clothes were respectable, but nothing worthy of catching the eye of anyone in the highbrow establishment. Her chin stayed down, her blue eyes darting back and forth uncertainly.
Her boyfriend had recently proposed, she had explained, and she needed an outfit for their engagement portrait. But she obviously didn’t have the faintest idea what that outfit should be.
The sales clerk quickly grew annoyed. She had to put up with that sort way too often. Teenage poseurs, trying to bluff their way into a gown their social station didn’t merit or their pocketbook could afford.
On top of that, the older woman was a French vendeuse (a fancy way of saying sales clerk), and everyone knows the French are famous for their patience and tolerance. The girl was simply getting on her nerves.
It was almost closing time, and the young shopper kept dilly-dallying, going back from one outfit to another.
The clerk finally had enough. “Perhaps you should try something more democratic,” she sniffed. “Why don’t you go to Harrods? It’s right around the corner.”
(A premium boutique suggesting Harrods department store would be akin to recommending Macy’s to a Hollywood starlet. Nice enough, but not in the same elite league.)
Her feelings hurt, the teenager hurried out, and the sales clerk went home for the day.
And that might have been the end of that, except for one thing.
The girl was Lady Diana Spencer. The fiancé who had popped the question a few days earlier was Charles, the Prince of Wales and future king of Great Britain. The scones were about to hit the fan.
Like all teenagers since the dawn of time, Diana shared her humiliating experience with her girlfriends. Who immediately told their friends. And they told theirs. Word quickly swept through the British capital. By the next morning, anybody who was anybody in London knew that Bellville Sassoon had snubbed a future queen of England.
Finding out what happened the next morning (this was before Twitter, text messages, and the internet), David Sassoon went ballistic. Then he went into damage control. Initially furious at the debacle, he quickly got over it. Diana was young and likely to be a high-profile member of the Royal Family for decades to come. He couldn’t risk losing her patronage.
So he called Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, a Bellville Sassoon customer, begging both her forgiveness and for a second chance.
The mother was sympathetic. But Diana was not. She did, indeed, buy her engagement portrait dress at Harrods, a blue Cojana suit soon seen in newspapers and magazine photos around the world.
Diana’s mother eventually mollified her and, acting as an intermediary, accompanied her on another visit to the store. This time she was treated like, well, a princess. Things were smoothed out, and Bellville Sassoon eventually made the peach going-away outfit Diana wore when she departed Buckingham Palace after the wedding.
“From then on, she only dealt with me,” Sassoon recalled. “Diana became the star, and everything changed overnight.”
The snobby sales clerk’s identity was never revealed. But it’s safe to assume she received one of history’s greatest chewing outs.
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Seems the same holds true for teenage shoppers, too.
