Myka says Meghan’s been having sitting lessons.We do the ‘Cambridge Cross’. My thighs burn. How does Kate do it?
give him his gin and tonic. Myka ended up offering Prince Charles his drink from a silver tray while trying to curtsy. Technically, she says, this is not correct.
you don’t bob while holding something heavy like a silver tray, but Prince Charles apparently made a joke about it and that was that. Crisis averted.
It was a eureka moment, however, because it sparked Myka’s ‘passion’ for etiquette. And her obsession with the Royals, although Prince Charles remains the only one she’s met. In London, she took classes with Alexandra Messervy, a former adviser to the Queen, before going to the Institut Villa Pierrefeu, a finishing school in Switzerland.
She returned to London and started teaching privately, while still working in PR, until the demand for etiquette classes became so great, she quit and launched her own business.
She and her Swiss husband Marco moved back to New york for his private equity job in 2014 and she’s been non- stop ever since. She now juggles running her business from The Plaza with travelling the globe for private clients ( she teaches general etiquette to children as well as adults), and raising her one-yearold daughter Valentina.
She’s taking The Duchess Effect on tour across America later this year and today there are cameras at the back of the room, filming Myka for a forthcoming Netflix documentary called The Renaissance of Etiquette.
So, here we all are at The Plaza, listening solemnly to Myka’s wisdom. Highlights include instructions on how to sit. Myka’s deadly serious and demonstrates two specific positions adopted by Kate Middleton.
firstly, the Duchess Slant, a name Myka coined having studied hundreds of photos of Kate. It means sitting straight on a chair with your legs uncrossed, but slanted at an angle, your knees and ankles together ‘to protect modesty’. So you don’t flash your knickers, in other words.
MYKAencourages us to try it, sitting forward so there is an egg’s gap between our bottoms and the back of the chair. This feels deeply uncomfortable, not unlike a pilates move. How does Kate sit though all those events without her thighs burning?
Then she demonstrates the Cambridge Cross, which is the same as the Duchess Slant but with your ankles crossed. My thighs start burning again. Meghan’s been having sitting lessons, Myka adds, showing us another slide with two photos. one is Meghan sitting crosslegged on a stool at an event before she was engaged to Prince Harry. The next is of the Royal foundation’s Make a Difference forum in february. There, between Harry and Kate, Meghan is sitting primly with just her ankles crossed.
Myka also shows us a picture of Meghan waving before the engagement and afterwards. Before she’s waving like you and I might, hand held high in the air, fingers splayed. ‘But in the past couple of weeks, she’s started waving in a completely different way,’ says Myka, pointing at another photo.
There, quite clearly, Meghan’s fingers are together, her hand is closer in towards her body. This is called ‘The Windsor Wave’. Gasps ripple across the room. ‘That’s astonishing,’ murmurs a blonde lady at another table.
We spend a good half hour on the difficulty of holding a clutch bag, because Myka says you should hold them in front of you with both hands, not under your shoulder in your armpit. She then demonstrates with her own LK Bennett bag. And talking of LK Bennett, next we’re into heel heights (maximum 4in during the day; 6in at night). Myka likes the LK Bennett sledge pump because it’s what Kate wears. ‘I have them in every colour, it’s ridiculous,’ she says. And, top tip, apparently Kate wears insoles made by a British company called Alice Bow because their padded heel makes the shoes more comfortable.
As Myka talks, she offers vocabulary advice. ‘In Britain, it’s pudding, not dessert,’ she says. ‘Sofa, not couch, afternoon tea not high tea, tights not stockings.’
‘What do we call the restroom in the uK?’ she quizzes us. ‘Lavatory,’ says ormonde, a hospitality student from Arkansas who’s here today with her mother, a chic blonde with a southern drawl and a long string of pearls around her neck.
‘Very good,’ says Myka. ‘While Ms Markle won’t be expected to change her accent, she will be expected to change her vocabulary.’
Lunch is back in the restaurant, where we have our cutlery instructions. Did you know there is a different spoon for different types of soups? Nope, neither did I. one for clear broths; a more rounded spoon for creamy soups. The level of detail is mind-blowing. So many spoons! Everyone sits at the table nervously looking at the bread baskets.
‘Do we dunk bread into our soup?’ asks Myka.
‘ No,’ someone says sadly at another table. ‘ We do not,’ Myka agrees, before teaching us how to butter a bread roll properly, bit by bit instead of in one go. I take two bread rolls because I’m so greedy. Then we’re served our soup — butternut squash bisque — and have to practise eating it neatly, lifting the spoons to our mouths instead of leaning over the bowl. Then there’s salmon fillet (‘peel the skin off and place it at the top left section of your plate’) followed by the aforementioned cake.
I ask Myka more about Meghan over lunch. What is she doing right at the moment? ‘She is just so approachable,’ says Myka. ‘People feel like they can relate to her. She’s the most relatable soon-tobe-Royal. And I don’t think she should change that.’
And wrong? Myka says she doesn’t want to criticise Meghan when she’s still learning. ‘ She’s used to walking red carpets and signing autographs, but that will stop. And she’s already taken herself off social media.’
Terry, a New yorker sitting opposite me, suddenly sighs as if in ecstacy: ‘It’s just the most wonderful Disney fairytale,’ she says.
It’s a common sentiment among everyone on the course — while Kate is the poised duchess now, it’s Meghan who’s marrying into the British royal family next. And if one of their own can become a British Royal, that means
anyone can. ‘People are still fascinated by the Duchess of Cambridge,’ says Myka. ‘ That’s what we get the most requests for. ‘ How do we become that?’ But in America some people are already calling Meghan a princess. for us this is a huge deal.’
AFTERcoffee, it’s back into our oak-panelled room for beauty and hair demonstrations. And again the level of knowledge is almost creepy. Kate’s favourite nail polish is Ballet Slippers by Essie, a pale pink, which Myka knows because when she was living near Kensington Palace, she once had her nails done in a salon after Kate and asked the manicurist what colour she used.
Apparently Kate uses a Mason Pearson hairbrush, which Myka discovered when, in January, Kate’s hairstylist Amanda Cook Instagrammed a photo of the tools she took on a royal trip to the Netherlands.
The photo has since been removed and Amanda’s Instagram account has been made private, but not before Myka divined what all the tools and products were — 13 brushes, seven combs, two hairdryers and three curling tongs. Plus several bottles of hair spray and mousse. The day finishes with a lesson on walking the red carpet. ‘We’ve got paparazzi here, so you can feel what it’s like,’ says Myka.
We line up outside the room, and walk back in, one by one, to stand in front of a board while five photographers, prompted with our names, shout at us — ‘ Show us what you’ve got, Sophia!’ I want to reply ‘sore feet from my heels and sweaty armpits,’ but that doesn’t seem terribly regal.
Then we’re given a goody bag — a bottle of Essie Ballet Slippers and the exact Natural Decay eyeshadow pallet that Kate uses, all browns and beiges — before everyone swaps Instagram details and says goodbye, happily gliding out of the hotel in our heels as Myka taught us.
Phew. I’m exhausted. My head is swirling with soup spoons, teacups and ketchup placement. When I was little I thought I’d grow up and marry ideally Prince William, Prince Harry at a push. To be honest, I’m quite glad Kate and Meghan have beaten me to it.