The First Lady and the Princess. The uses of luxury by Eva Perón and Diana Spencer, between style and politics

The paper traces and compares the uses of luxury in the public images of Eva Perón and Diana Spencer. The profound interpersonal connections that these two historical figures generated by means of their appeal to “the people” is interpreted in the light of the “excess” of luxury, and its capacity to allow for envisioning a breach in social hierarchies (whether it is achieved in actuality or not). Evita’s charisma is re-interpreted not as an individual phenomenon, but as the product of the convergence between the Peronist state, the media system and the “melodramatization” of politics. It is also argued that her uses of luxury should be seen in the context of a manifesto of “aesthetic justice”, as a form of redistribution of wealth to the Argentine people. Diana’s “empowerment trajectory” is plotted through the evolution of visual rhetoric in tabloid and fashion photography. Caught between the royal institution and the star system, she developed her own fashion style for her humanitarian activities. The mourning ensued by her death is linked to the persistence of a postcolonial imaginary in the iconography.