Princess Diana's Hairstylist Reveals the Real Reason Behind Her Bob Cut: "We Never Looked..."

Princess Diana was a staunch royalist but she had her way of rebelling against her failing marriage with Prince Charles. Fashion was her secret weapon, the princess shifted from flats to high heels, wore bold outfits, and cut her hair short to showcase her freedom. During the 90s her famed short bob caught the media attention by storm, Sam McKnight, the man behind her voguish transformation revealed in the latest episode of Vogue‘s YouTube series Vogue Visionaries that it was an impulsive decision. “So I cut it off then, and we never looked back,” he recalled. 

According to Style Caster, the Princess of Wales forged a deep bond with the famed hairstylist during her 90s Vogue photoshoot. Impressed with his styling Princess Diana asked him what, if given the chance, he would do with her hair. “I said, ‘I would cut it all off and just start again',” McKnight recounted. He continued, “It was the beginning of the ’90s and it was at the time that I was doing lots of shows and covers and a lot of the girls had short hair, and we were moving from the big frou-frou ’80s into the sharp, more androgynous, business chic of the ’90s.” “‘Well, why don’t you just cut it off now?'” the celebrity hairstylist remembered her saying.

Richard Dalton, her hairdresser, revealed that the princess had always wanted shorter hair even while going for royal trips. But she was apprehensive about her image, “Whatever I did to her hair became front-page news,” he said. “We had to be very careful. We had to do it one-fourth of an inch at a time over several weeks.” According to Town & Country Magazine, Dalton worked with the princess since she was seventeen. Diana's hair was styled by the renowned hairdresser in the run-up to her 1981 wedding to Prince Charles.

In an exclusive with People, while promoting his book, he later admitted that he and Diana weren't entirely happy with the way she looked on the special day. “Diana did express to me that she wished she could do the wedding over again to ‘get the hair right’. However, she never mentioned any other regrets while I did her hair,” he wrote in his latest book titled -  It’s All About the Hair—My Decade with Diana. “I loved taking risks with Diana’s hair by trying new things like the orchards in Thailand,” he recalled. 

Dalton experimented by pinning fresh orchids to match her fuschia and purple Catherine Walker dress for an event on February 4, 1988. "They were staying at the Imperial Hotel in Bangkok," he wrote. “And I literally went around the hotel all day pinching orchids from the floral arrangements to use as accessories in Diana’s hair to match her dress." For the occasion, he pinned the flowers on one side of the Princess of Wales' hair and put her hair up in a chignon. “Fresh flowers had never been done before, and she looked sensational that night — and she knew it,” he concluded in his book.

As per Today, MacKnight echoed similar sentiments to Dalton and stated that the Princess of Wales liked to maintain her signature hairstyle while on trips since she knew it was crucial to preserving her meticulously crafted public persona ."She had developed this style of her own that was stripped of all the sort of artifice of the '80s," he said. "She was just becoming this amazing, confident, modern woman."