Season Five of The Crown debuts this month, covering the ’90s-era decline of the marriage between Princess Diana and Prince Charles as well as, arguably, the most influential fashion era of Diana’s life. For each of the ten episodes, we will recap the fashion of the show, focusing in particular on Diana and her obsession with offering messages and stories through her clothes, with digressions on the Duchess of Windsor, the late Queen, and other royal style icons portrayed on the series. Read the recap of episode one here.

Last episode, we talked about how The Crown has a sort of bizarre commitment to sartorial accuracy that, dazzling in its unflinching accuracy though it may be, doesn’t adhere to the Princess’s own philosophy of style. But the opening Diana look of episode two—“The System”—shows us our girl as we know her well: looking a little bit too great for the circumstances. She’s attending a funeral in a black collarless jacket with gold buttons, looking fabulously sad. But perhaps she is simply a woman who knew how to look good while feeling bad. Or maybe: the better she looked, the worse she was feeling. You could never say Diana didn’t use every tool at her disposal to win our hearts.

Episode two covers Diana’s first attempts to take the matter of her public image into her own hands. Desperate for the rest of the world outside her royal bubble to understand how difficult life inside the palace was, she secretly made tapes for journalist…