Fashion designer Catherine Walker, a pet of Diana, Princess of Wales, has died at the age of 65, her family said.

She fought a long battle with cancer previous to passing away at a hospital near her Sussex home on Thursday.

Born in France, Walker made a name for herself in Britain as one of the country’s foremost couture designers.

She provided Diana with numerous of her most iconic outfits, having first worked with her three months following her wedding to Prince Charles in 1981. The Princess was buried in a black dress designed by Walker that she had bought in the weeks important up to her death.

In a statement, her family said: Catherine Walker conquer young widowhood and fought cancer twice with enduring bravery.

She built one of the most victorious British couture brands and at the same time increased a loving family. Catherine Walker has dressed many of the world’s most gorgeous women.

Long ago, in a far-off land called the 1970s, the fashion spreads in magazines for young teens utilized to be drawn, not photographed. I loved those drawings, of tall, slender, elegant creatures, all with precisely the same faces, figures and hair, in absolutely fitting, perfectly draping clothes.

At the time, I thought extends were drawn because the women they depicted were too unfeasibly idealized to exist in real life. Last Saturday, the vastly rated stylist Katie Grand recreated those 70s drawings precisely, using real women, and real clothes, for London Fashion Week’s Topshop Unique catwalk show. I’d forgotten the drawings until I saw them brought to life, similar to weird magic, like amazing out of the Nutcracker.

Now I appreciate that the 70s presentation of teenage fashion was now a much cheaper and less labour-intensive way of doing things, back when fashion wasn’t fairly the huge British industry it is now.

In 1970, Grand could incredibly well have been drawing clothes manufactured in Britain. In 2010, she commands a massive budget and loads of staff, to show clothes manufactured abroad to an audience of writers and photographers employed to clarify them. Forty years of profound economic shift, all summarized on one catwalk.