Meghan’s ‘Justlike-us’ jumper
The semiotics emanating from the jumper, skinny jeans and knee-high boots that the Duchess of Sussex wore on her visit to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver were blunt.
For this Duchess at least, there would be no more attempts to negotiate her way around Palace etiquette about what is and isn’t sartorially appropriate. No more struggling to hit the right note between HRH and “modern”. No more pale blush couture. No more agonising over hats, the “right” colour nail polish and whether or not to wear sheer tan or, horror, sheer white tights, as she did for that garden party on Prince Charles’s birthday just after the wedding.
Meghan’s attempts to square traditional British royal dress codes with her Jennifer Anistonleaning aspirations have led her on a whistle-stop tour of 20th-century fashion mavens.
One minute Carolyn Bessette-kennedy, whose sleek, impeccable taste Meghan openly admired when she was still a jobbing actress, the next Eva Perón, whose Paris-couture addiction Meghan briefly showed signs of slipping into.
There were bits of Audrey Hepburn (the wedding gown); the English Rose weeks (a floaty Oscar de la Renta patterned chiffon frock she wore when she accompanied Prince Harry to a wedding in June 2018). Sometimes she’d slip back into LA Meghan mode, such as when she wore a mini black tuxedodress to a charity performance of Hamilton in the late summer of 2018.
Then Carolyn would reassert herself – as in the one-shoulder black velvet Givenchy dress she wore to the Fashion Awards at the end of that year. Latterly, drizzlings of the super luxe beigy-cream minimalism Aniston wears in Apple TV’S The Morning Show were interspersed with pointedly inexpensive high street buys from H&M (oh, the irony of those Swedish initials).
The detours were understandable. Uniforms are only easy and liberating if you ascribe to their raison d’être. If you’re an independent actress who’s suddenly being made aware that dark nails, a couple of extra ear piercings, your trademark loose tendrils (the most flattering style for your face shape) and your default position (like 80 per cent of the rest of the female population) of slipping into trousers, are in danger of toppling an ancient institution, they probably grate after a while.
For me, one of Meghan’s most successful outfits came early on. After the engagement was announced, but before the wedding, she wore a slim black Alexander Mcqueen trouser suit that ticked a lot of boxes. British, it suited her figure, was neither so expensive as to be absurd nor so cheap as to be making a pointless point, and it seemed to mark a respectful but distinctive path away from the style of her future sister-in-law.
After that, she kept wavering, uncertain where to pitch the tone, pricing and cut of her clothes. But the Duchess of Cambridge also took time to find her feet (and wrench them out of those nude platform LK Bennetts). Most of us would.
Euro royal dressing is a dialect that requires mastering. To Americans, it’s a foreign language. Even the social X-rays of Houston or Charleston don’t wear Ascot-y hats. For them status equals labels, sleekness, toned skinniness and taut, wrinkle-free faces. They struggle to understand why a royal would have to wear Reiss.
While many can sympathise with the Sussexes’ desire to step back and modernise, even if they don’t like the manner in which it’s being done, it’s the relatively minuscule amount of time Meghan gave the whole “project’ that seems mystifying.
Yes, the trolls were beastly – but anyone who puts their head above the parapet gets trolled. The generally agreed solution is not to read them. Yet we learn this week that Harry isn’t just a compulsive reader of Mail Online, but a dedicated scroller of the comments – not to be recommended to anyone who values their mental health.
Presumably he unburdened his findings on Meghan – assuming she wasn’t equally knee-deep in the quagmire of abuse about everything from her teeth to her feet.
So now she’s “free”. She can wear jumpers and skinnies instead of dresses and matching coats. That’s great – and when she stood with the other women in Vancouver, instead of a stiff, ill-at-ease American struggling to be royal, she looked just like them. Except, wouldn’t you know, the jumper was from The Row, the label founded by the Olsen twins that’s beloved by fashionable, wealthy lovers of stealth luxury. The price of an average Row jumper? £1,200. Like us, then. But not quite.