Lady Dior's story, the bag that the firm created for Lady Di and that the princess could only enjoy two years

It is curious, and ironic if we look at the difference in their personalities, that the image of the three most famous British women of the second half of the 20th century (with the permission of the Spice Girls) is linked to a bag .

Queen Elizabeth II has been wearing the Traviata model by Launer in black and white by day for six decades. As Hugo Vickers, historian and expert on the Windsor family, revealed to People magazine three years ago, the sovereign takes it to communicate with her assistants in public. If the monarch changes her handpiece (usually she carries it on her left to greet with her right hand) it means that the chatter with an interlocutor has ended and she is ready to hit the boneless with the next guest. If he places it on a table, he is warning his bodyguards that it is time to collect himself and that each little owl must return to its olive tree: the evening is over. And if she leaves it on the ground, so it must be sitting, the sovereign is asking her lady-in-waiting for an urgent ransom. SOS, the dean of European monarchs is bored.

Last November, the accessories firm confirmed that for some time Her Grace, who has already combed her hair for 94 years, has been adorned with a lighter version of the accessory with the name of Verdi's opera. In this bag – which alternates with other Launer models – she collects odds and ends of enormous sentimental value that have nothing to do with the great state secrets.

The one who did store compromising information in her bag was Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (she was from 1979 to 1990) used her Asprey London portfolio not as a shield, but as a combat weapon. He went so far as to affirm that when a debate got stuck at one point, the solution was always in his favorite plugin. It brought him to overflowing with little pieces of paper in which he collected ideas on the most diverse topics. His way of doing politics was baptized as bag diplomacy. It's no surprise that her daughter, Carol Thatcher, was outraged when London City Council, led by Boris Johnson, commissioned a statue of the empty-handed Iron Lady in 2013.

Princess Diana, whose style, 23 years after her death, continues to gain followers and grab headlines – partly thanks to the success of the series The Crown (Netflix) of whose fourth season she is the unofficial star – achieved something that no of his two aforementioned compatriots have achieved so far: give a name to a bag. We have to talk about a bag with a first and last name: the Lady Dior.

On September 30, 1995, sponsored by the luxury conglomerate LVMH and Christian Dior, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris opened a retrospective of the work of Paul Cézanne at the Grand Palais (under its dome Chanel usually parades). Diana Spencer, separated but not yet divorced from Prince Charles of the United Kingdom, was in charge of chairing the gala dinner with which the ambitious project was celebrated five days before. Sandringham's wore a red cocktail dress with a bow on the chest and matching accessories.

That same afternoon, before touring the exhibition of the post-impressionist painter accompanied by President Jacques Chirac, she had visited the Élysée Palace where the first lady Bernadette and Bernard Arnault, general director of the LVMH Group, under whose umbrella companies meet, were waiting for her like Moët & Chandon, Ruinart, Sephora, Bulgari, Chaumet, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Celine, Loewe and the aforementioned Dior. As a courtesy gift, Lady Di received a bag from the Christian Dior house that sponsored the exhibition. Diplomatic meetings generally end with an exchange of made-in gifts where one and the other come from –for example, in 2004 the now kings of Spain gave Pope John Paul II a silver image of the Virgen del Pilar and he gave the then princes of Asturias 20 medals with the mysteries of the rosary. It was Bernadette Chirac who proposed to the company that the princess should not be thanked for the visit with any gallantry for sale in the boutique on Avenue Montaigne.

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The creative team, led by Gianfranco Ferré, decided to reissue the Chouchou model for Queen Elizabeth's daughter-in-law, a small jet leather handbag with handles. From the end of one of them hang some ornaments in the shape of the letters of the firm's last name. Its cannage (grid) print is inspired by the seat of the Napoleon III chairs that Christian Dior used in his first show in 1947. The Princess of Wales loved the gift.

He premiered it on October 1 of that same year at the inauguration of the Birmingham Foundation for Conductive Education for the Disabled. The image of Diana hugging a child with her Chouchou de Dior bag went around the world. A year later the model was renamed Lady Dior on the market. A pun resulting from the fusion of the abbreviation of the name of Greek origin of the princess and the surname of the firm. The model Carla Bruni, who ended up being first lady of the French republic after her marriage to Nicolas Sarkozy, was one of the first to be photographed with the famous bag for an advertisement for the house.

Each piece requires the intervention of seven artisans and a minimum of an eight-hour working day to be made. The nearly 130 pieces of leather needed to create it are cut and sewn by hand. The Lady Dior bestseller survives to this day reformulated in different sizes, patterns and materials. The princess could not use it for more than two years, death found her in a Parisian tunnel on the night of August 31, 1997.