Nicholas Coleridge Spills Princess Diana's Shopping Secret, Throws Shade At Anna Wintour & More!

Chances are, unless you're from the UK, you've never heard of Nicholas Coleridge. Sure the last name sounds familiar, at least I'd hope so - he's a descendent of the Romantic Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But Nicholas? Well for 30 years he was at the very top of Conde Nast International, leaving him with quite the bag of fashionable tales to tell in his memoir, The Glossy Years. Truly, it's a must read for all the delectable bits of gossip.

You see, Nicholas is our favorite type of person. Incredibly well connected and more than happy to talk! This week, sitting down to chat with the Sheerluxe podcast, he let some very fun stories spill. 

Was he throwing shade? You be the judge!

Firstly, regarding Princess Diana, Nicholas shared her very interesting shopping secret! 

"'[During] the period when I was first working at Conde Nast, [the Princess of Wales] used to come in there a lot to Vogue House and she had a very particular reason for coming in. And that was that she found it very embarrassing to go to shops in Sloane Street or in Bond Street and try on clothes by a designer and then buy nothing and not get something. Because when she came in there was such excitement and everyone working there was so thrilled so then if she didn't buy something she felt that she caused great disappointment to everyone who worked there. So she had an arrangement with Vogue that if she wanted to try a new designer, the magazine would call in quite a lot of clothes from that designer for her to try them on and then the fashion editors there would look at them with her and they would say 'you know we think you look great in this one, this one I don't think works quite so well, this one is marvelous.' Her people would then ring the designer and say the Princess saw some clothes you lent to Vogue and wants to buy two of them and she found that much easier."

Next up for discussion? Victoria Beckham's bizarre penchant for bringing her family everywhere!

"There was a time when I was running the British Fashion Council and Victoria Beckham was absolutely the zenith of her moment, I think actually her moment continues to this very day. And we always longed to have Victoria Beckham to all these Fashion Council awards and everything that we did, and when she came she always insisted on bringing her entire family and this is the weirdest thing. So we would invite her and then you'd get a message saying that Victoria would want to come but she'd want to bring her sister Louise, her sister Louise's partner, and her mum and her dad, and her dad's brother, and they all wanted to be on the top table. So the whole of the top table sort of became the Beckham family table so there was a period of my life when I was always sitting next to distant members of the Beckham family, who were all there, there was no one who wasn't there."

Last on the chopping block? Anna Wintour, who at one point, it appears, was capable of taking off her sunglasses. The shock!

"Well, Anna Wintour, what a phenomenon she is. I knew her first before she started wearing dark glasses, which was a big moment in her life, but for the first six or seven years when she was editing and a was a figure, she only wore dark glasses about half the time and she used to take them off for lunch. When I was editing Harpers she was the editor of British Vogue at that time and we would have lunch together not more often than once a year, but about once a year, and she didn't wear her glasses. It was much easier I found communicating with her in those days. You could see the whites of her eyes, you could see her burning ambition."

[Photo via @theannawintour]