Anna Wintour and Tina Brown have discussed their last lunch with Princess Diana

The Vogue editor-in-chief and former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown met with Diana six weeks before her death in 1997
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Lauren Keary16 April 2019

Real royalty fused with press royalty last week at the Women in the World Summit. The Women in the World Summit brings impactful women from all over the world together to discuss their stories of success. Two of those women were Tina Brown, founder of the Women in the World Summit and journalist famous for her nine years as editor-in-chief at Vanity Fair, and Anna Wintour, reigning editor-in-chief of Vogue.

During their conversation at the Summit, the two journalistic forces took a step back in time to discuss having lunch with Princess Diana six weeks before her death.

Anna Wintour and Tina Brown
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"She looked incredible, first of all. That was the most important thing, and she looked fantastic," Wintour said, mentioning Princess Diana's green Chanel suit. "I heard that she spent a lot of time deciding what to wear to that particular lunch.”

Princess Diana (L), Washington Post owner Katheryn Graham, Vogue Magazine editor Anna Wintour, designer Ralph Lauren, and Georgetown University President Leo J. O'Donovan (R) work the receiving line during a fundraising event for the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research in 1996
AFP/Getty Images

This lunch meeting occurred at the Four Seasons in New York in July of 1997. “What I remember from that lunch is how much she spoke about loneliness, how terribly lonely she seemed,” Brown recalled. “And how lovingly she spoke about her boys."

Princess Diana takes Prince Harry and Prince William skiing
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Wintour remembered her speaking on a different topic. “What I remember her talking about quite a bit is how the Royal Family - and obviously it’s a different time now, and I think things have completely changed - were not comfortable dealing with the media. I think that part of her popularity was that Princess Diana really was so good with the media and was so in tune with them and welcomed them rather than standing back. In a way, she was certainly the first person in the royal family to understand the benefits of that."

Princess Diana
AFP/Getty Images

Brown wrote a celebrated biography of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, which explores Princess Diana’s life as a part of the Royal family. "Diana had a sense of the media, a strong sense of how the royals could get their image right,” wrote Brown. “You never saw pictures of her coming out of nightclubs with her skirt up. She never looked a mess, or inappropriate. And she was very strict with her children when it came to manners."

Anna Wintour - style file

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