Princess Diana’s Wedding Shoes Featured a Secret Symbol

The gown Princess Diana wore to tie the knot with Prince Charles is one of the most world’s most well-known wedding dresses. The silk-and-taffeta piece featured 10,000 hand-embroidered pearls, lace-trimmed puff sleeves, and a showstopping 25-foot train. The ensemble was estimated to cost $115,000 on the couple’s big day, equivalent to approximately $400,000 today. However, while much of the public attention on the bride’s outfit centered around the iconic dress, her shoes included a sentimental secret symbol.

Her low heels, which were designed by Chive Shilton, were specifically crafted to ensure that Diana wouldn’t appear taller than Charles on the day of the duo’s nuptials. The shoes featured 542 sequins and 132 pearls, Shilton told the Daily Mail. While the shoemaker had reportedly planned to use the same fabric from the bride’s dress in creating the heels, the silk was reportedly “too fine” for him to do so. However, in addition to the embellishments, each of the heels’ bottoms included a personal symbol that nodded to the bride and groom: A hand-painted “C” and “D” with a heart between the two initials.

“No one even saw the bottom of the shoes, but it was important to us that they looked fantastic,” the shoemaker told the outlet. “You would have seen much more of them if she’d tripped!’ Ultimately, it took Shilton six months to craft the special heels. While the designer never revealed the cost of the shoes, in 2011, he sold a pair of her shoes for £36,000, equivalent to approximately $75,000 today.

Why Princess Diana Never Wore High Heels During Her Marriage to Prince Charles

The principle Diana applied to her wedding shoes continued for the duration of her marriage to Charles. Over the course of the couple’s relationship, the princess only selected flats or low heels to not appear taller than her husband. The choice seemed to stem from a desire not to upset the prince. “For years, Diana wore shoes no higher than two inches out of respect to her husband’s ego,” Eloise Moran wrote in “The Lady Di Look Book,” according to Insider. “Since he was the same height she was.”

However, as the couple began to grow distant of one another, the princess started to wear higher heels. “Jimmy Choo recalled that at the start of their seven-year friendship, Diana always ordered flats, then as her marriage started to crumble, the heels got higher,” Moran wrote. “‘First she went up to 2in, then 3in, then 3½ in, then ¾ in,’ Choo said. ‘They just kept creeping up and up.'” This concept was reflected in one of the princess’s most well-known looks; on June 29, 1994, when Diana donned the iconic “revenge dress” to a gala hosted by Vanity Fair, she paired the piece with high Manolo Blahnik heels.