Princess Diana’s wardrobe is usually remembered in its grand moments: the wedding dress, the revenge dress, the gowns that made headlines. But some of the pieces that tell us most about her were the ones she reached for on ordinary days. In the last years of her life, she was photographed again and again leaving the gym, running errands and traveling with the same soft leather tote on her arm. She was not paid to carry it. She simply liked it. And she carried it so often that the Italian house that made it ended up giving it her name.
The bag she chose herself
The bag was made by Tod’s, the Italian leather goods house best known for its driving loafers, which Diana also wore. It was a boxy, structured tote in soft leather with almost no visible branding: practical, discreet and quietly expensive, a world away from the logo-heavy It bags of the time. Unlike so many famous women whose accessories are gifted for publicity, Diana is said to have discovered the brand on her own, browsing in its stores. Tod’s chairman Diego Della Valle has been quoted as saying that what struck the company was how she used the bag in every part of her life, from official dinners to her trips to Africa.
After her divorce in 1996, as she built a more independent, more casual public image, the tote became a fixture. Paparazzi photographs from the period show her with it outside the Harbour Club gym in London, on the way to lunch, on her travels: always the same understated shape, usually in tan or black leather.
How it became the D-Bag
Video credit : Youtube @Rose Ellington
In 1997, the year she died, Tod’s renamed the tote the D-Bag in her honor. HELLO! later reported that it was such a favorite of hers that the label chose to name it after her, and the name stuck. Over the years, it became one of the brand’s signatures, carried by everyone from Princess Caroline of Monaco to Katie Holmes, Diane Kruger and Demi Moore. When the 2013 film Diana was made, Tod’s made sure that Naomi Watts could carry the princess’s own original tan D-Bag on screen.
Diana was not the only royal to inspire a bag’s name. Dior renamed its Chouchou the Lady Dior in 1996 after she carried it everywhere, and at least five famous handbags, from Gucci to Chanel, are now associated with her. But the Tod’s tote is the one that belonged to the most private, least performed part of her life.
Nearly 30 years later
The bag never went away. Tod’s reissued it as the Di Bag in 2013, and that same year Kate Middleton, Diana’s daughter-in-law, was spotted carrying a softer version in gray leather. In 2019 it was reworked as the D-Styling, and Harper’s Bazaar described it then as still the brand’s most iconic and well-known handbag, more than two decades after its launch. The range has kept evolving since, with a flap version and a mini added in 2024, priced from around $2,660 to well over $4,000.
Part of its staying power is that it was never really a trend piece. It is the same quiet, low-branding luxury that the loafers and denim of this fall are built on, and that Diana, characteristically, got to long before everyone else.
The takeaway
Princess Diana carried a simple Tod’s leather tote so often in the 1990s that the brand renamed it after her in 1997. Nearly 30 years later, reissued as the Di Bag and updated again and again, it is still widely considered the house’s most iconic design. It is a fitting legacy for a woman whose most enduring style lesson may be the simplest one: find the thing you love, and carry it everywhere.
