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0:00 Early Life
7:08 Marriage to The Duke
11:45 Bess & The Love Triangle
16:58 Death & Diana Parallels
19:07 What did Georgiana Look Like?
21:22 Re-creations Revealed
Let’s talk about Georgaina Spencer – a famous descendant of Princess Diana. The parallels between the two women’s lives are striking. Both beautiful, extremely charismatic, and both stuck in devastating love triangles.
Today, we’ll talk about Georgaina’s life, and reveal what she may have looked like at the end. Hit that subscribe button, and stick around for a bonus re-creation of Princess Diana as an 18th century woman.
Horace Walpole described her as “a phenomenon” of fashion, culture, and sophistication – and she genuinely was.
Georgiana didn’t just set trends, she invented them. As Dr. Amanda Foreman put it, when Georgiana first came on the scene after marrying the Duke of Devonshire,, the close-knit inner circle of British high society were expecting this new, young duchess to make her mark. And she chose to do that with fashion.
At her very first ball post-marriage, she wore six foot ostrich feathers in her hair, literally sitting on the floor of her carriage on the way to accommodate them.
A newspaper wrote the next day that “Her head was a wonderful exhibition.”
This was such a hit that ostrich feathers suddenly sold out across London. When she tried something new – a new color or even a grey powder in her hair – it was instantly copied. She just had that certain something – that jen a se quois – that made people want to be just like her.
We can also see her humor on full display in her fashion – historian Amanda Foreman recalled that Georgaina would wear a locket around her neck, like a cat collar, that said something like“If found lost, return to the Duke of Devonshire”
The best known portrait of Georgiana features her outrageous fashion, with this huge, menswear-inspired hat. After accompanying her husband to military training camps, she also adopted military elements in her personal fashion.
One can’t help but wonder, based on the story you heard earlier, how much of this was to try to catch the attention of her absent husband.
She also popularized the simple muslin dress called a robe en chemise in England, after her friend Marie Antoinette sent her one. You might recognize this style of dress from this famous portrait of Marie.
Georgiana had many portraits painted during her lifetime, even as a little girl. We can see her natural dark blonde hair and light brown eyes. I also appreciate that she kept her eyebrows naturally full through her life, instead of plucking them thinly like other fashionable ladies of the period.
She does look a little different in each portrait. Thomas Gainsborough painted her many times, and while he was a wonderful artist he did lean towards painting features a little abstractly. She has a beautiful, angular face in her youth, and it gets more full and rounded as she ages. I made my re-creation from a portrait of her made in 1783, when she would have been 26.
Since we talked so much about the parallel’s with princess diana throughout the story, I also thought it would be fun to make a portrait of Diana in Georgiana’s time, to see what she would have looked like in the 18th century.
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