Meet Kate and Meghan’s style super-stalkers
For a dedicated online group, every new royal outfit is an opportunity to go viral
What do an IT specialist from Nebraska, an eyelash technician from Alberta, and a sales rep from Brooklyn, N.Y., have in common? They’re the royal fashion superfans you never knew you were riveted by. If you’ve ever taken pause to wonder, “What is Kate wearing?” then you are but one click away from a very comprehensive answer. Their social media accounts are obsessively updated for their thousands of followers — at lightning speed — every time a duchess leaves a palace.
Take recently, when grainy tabloid pictures were published of Meghan watching Harry compete in the Audi Polo Challenge. Within minutes, the editors of UFO (that’s Unidentified Fashion Object) No More, had leaped into action and tracked down the gingham Shoshanna dress — a discontinued style from last year — which Meghan was wearing.
“It’s like a social club from school,” says Laura Faurot, 25, the Omaha, Nebraska, IT specialist and co-editor of UFO No More, who puts her techie skills to use finding archived versions of web pages with which to identify the Duchesses’ clothes.
While Faurot’s gateway to royal style obsession was fashion — she built up an encyclopedic knowledge from studying the now-defunct style.com in her teens — her fellow bloggers tend to be what could only be described as purist royal fanatics. “I started following and chronicling Kate Middleton back in 2010, and was just mesmerized by her glamorous life while dating Prince William,” says Janelle Nash, a 40-year-old from Scottsdale, Arizona, who runs her royal Instagram accounts full-time, styling herself head-to-toe in “repliKates” and “repliMeghans” (the art of copying a duchess look head to toe). For others, the genesis of their hobby goes further back: “I became obsessed with Princess Diana when I was 10 years old,” offers New Yorker Sarah Miello, whose account, @theroyalwatcher, is closing in on 20,000 followers. “I think my mother (Sharron) breastfed it to me,” muses Jami Molcak, the Edmonton-based eyelash technician whose Instagram account, @royalteawithjam, has surpassed 135,000 followers. In an age where the Kardashians reign supreme as style influencers, what unites these royal superfans is their idealization of the duchesses as antidotes to the transient drama and shallow veneer of celebrity — even if Meghan was one, too, not so long ago.
“Kate and Meghan are worlds away from being mere celebrities,” says Nash.
For Nash, four to eight hours each day are spent scouring the internet for old items and looking at new pictures of the royals. It’s still a hobby at the moment (although some accounts have made a business from earning revenue from the links to items they post), but one which she takes very seriously. Known on Instagram as “The lady Nash,” she has more than 31,000 followers on her repliKate page and surpassed 17,000 followers on her repliMeghan page. What toll does royal superfandom take? “My husband says it takes up too much time with no financial return. My children think it takes me away from them. But there is always another post that needs to be made. Somewhere we have found a happy medium — or they have just accepted my craziness,” says Molcak. For Vancouver blogger Stephanie Albrecht, a.k.a. @budget– duchess, her latest mission has been to enlist her husband and daughter to feature in her posts. In February, the couple re-enacted a picture of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge skiing. “He is a good sport about the whole thing and very patient.”