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Channeling Lady Di in Berlin: a 1986 memory

… it was 1986. I had a Princess Diana haircut — as nearly all of us did at the time …

MARTINA NICOLLS

Jun 9

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We didn’t just wear our hair like Lady Di – the feathered fringe and the softly sculpted sides – we wore her attitude: that confident-yet-casual look, a little cheeky, a little brave, and entirely charming.

In 1986, I traded Australia for three months in West Berlin, living with my mother’s relatives. Recently, my uncle found some throwback polaroid photographs and they brought back beautiful memories:

• Sitting at his garden table with my uncle, aunt, and their mothers – my grandmothers.

• A point-and-shoot camera beside me, long before selfies were a thing.

• The vines, the wallpaper of greenery, the soft filter of 35mm film making everything feel like a memory even as it was happening.

• That haircut. The most 1986 version of myself channeling Princess Diana from the suburbs of Adelaide to the backyard of Berlin.

Let’s set the scene. Diana, Princess of Wales, was at peak global fascination. Only five years into her royal marriage, she was the most photographed woman in the world, raising two young princes, redefining royal fashion, and making headlines everywhere from Newsweek to Vogue. Her style of collared pastels, velvet evening gowns, pie-crust blouses, and her legendary signature haircut was replicated across continents. It was chic, clean, and practically a rite of passage.

In West Berlin, the Cold War was still very real. The Berlin Wall loomed large, and life on either side of it – East and West Berlin – moved in different ways in the divided city. East Berlin was a street or two away, but a world apart.

I didn’t know then that Diana’s influence would last decades and that she would become more than a fashion icon, more than a princess, and a cultural symbol of vulnerability and strength. And I certainly didn’t know that someday, I’d find these photos and feel both completely foreign and completely familiar with the version of me in the green printed dress. I made the dress from kangaroo-print fabric in the Australia colours of green and gold.

The light in these photos is golden. My expression is slightly serious. Was I concentrating, contemplating, or daydreaming? That’s the joy of old photographs: they let us see who we were before we had to explain ourselves.

I was journaling back then. We called it “keeping a diary” and my grandmother thought it odd that I wrote all the time. She would wonder what I could possibly be writing about: “Was schreibst du, Martina? Du klingst wie ein Igel.” (“What are you writing, Martina? You sound like a hedgehog.”)

So, I drink a toast to those Berlin days, Princess Diana, iced coffee topped with cream, soft-focus photo film, and the parts of us that return, decades later, in the form of photographic flashbacks. And to the haircut that, for a brief and shining moment, made me feel so chic.

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