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Princess Diana once presented a royal correspondent with a special gift after they praised her legs during a visit to Kensington Palace.
Jennie Bond, formerly royal correspondent for the BBC from 1989 to 2003, has told OK! that Diana gave her a pair of her famous tights after Bond complimented the royal's "great legs" during a meeting a year before her untimely death.
Speaking to OK! Bond discussed her royal reporting career and the mementos she has kept.
"I'm not a great one for collecting memorabilia but inevitably, you know, traveling around you do have some bits and pieces," she explained.
"Perhaps the most important is this," she added, retrieving from a box a pair of packaged ladies tights.
"It seems a bit weird to have a pair of tights I know," she continued, "but I was with Diana, Princess of Wales, once at Kensington Palace and I admired her legs. I said 'you've got such great legs ma'am.'"
To this Diana went and retrieved the accessory she credited the compliment to. "She ran off to the bedroom and she presented me with a pair of tights and I wore them," Bond said.
She continued: "They were my royal tights. Then I laddered them! So I wrote her a little note and said 'Oh, I'm so sorry ma'am, I've laddered my royal tights but my legs still didn't look like yours anyway.'"
"The next thing, I was invited to the palace and given this box...I took it home and inside there were seven pairs of tights and she gave me a little note as well which was lovely."
Bond then read the note from Diana which was dated December 14, 1996 on Kensington Palace writing paper, just eight months before she died: 'I hope you see the amusing side of this package. Anyway, wishing you a happy Christmas from Diana.'
"I love that," Bond concluded.
What Diana wore on her famous legs was as closely followed by the fashion press and royal watchers of the 1980s and 1990s as any other aspect of her wardrobe.
In 1983, when the princess chose not to wear tights on a hot royal tour in Canada, it made the headlines in Britain with the Daily Mirror running a feature titled "The Bare Truth About Princess Di: Even she doesn't wear tights when it's really hot."
In the 1980s, Diana experimented with her tights wearing a shocking pink pair with open toed shoes beneath a voluminous blue ball gown on a visit to Spain, and debuting a pair of black tights with tulle rosettes stitched to the heel on a visit to Australia in 1988.
By the 1990s the princess had adopted a chicer, more streamlined aesthetic and began regularly wearing sheer tights with a subtle shimmer which she soon became noted for.
The pairs of tights Diana gave to Bond were made by the hosiery brand Aristoc in their Ultra Five model shade Blonde, released in the early 1990s.
This year, 2022, marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Diana in a car crash in Paris' Pont de l'Alma tunnel on August 31, 1997.
The crash killed three people, including the princess and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed.
Investigations later found the driver of the car to be under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crash as well as assigning a proportion of responsibility of the accident on the behavior of the pursuing paparazzi photographers.
In 2017, Bond recalled her memories of the days following Diana's death to the Huffington Post, saying: "We knew she was dead but we still hadn't had it confirmed officially. I knew what was going on, listening to the tone on the radio and knowing that they now knew she was dead and couldn't say it. The tone became much more serious and I knew why."
When the news had been confirmed Bond said she used her personal knowledge of the princess, learned over their years working alongside one another, to pay an informed tribute.
"I'd had long extensive conversations with Diana during the previous two years and taken notes. I had used the information as background for myself but never broadcast verbatim what she'd told me," she said.
"I sent a message to my producer and told him to go to my locker and get these certain notebooks out and so I was able to use that stuff too. I had a lot of background and I knew her quite well so I had a lot to talk about."
So far, there are no official plans for members of the royal family to mark the 25th anniversary of Diana's death. Last summer Prince William and Prince Harry in the presence of Diana's siblings and close friends unveiled a statue of their mother in the grounds of her former home, Kensington Palace.
About the writer
James Crawford-Smith is a Newsweek Royal Reporter, based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on the British royal family ... Read more