The bland Princess
Atwood charge that Kate is an ‘uneventful’ dresser compared with Lady Di has upset royal fashion fans
Margaret Atwood has roused indignation among British royal watchers by telling a museum audience in London that Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, has a boring sense of style, likely does not choose her own clothes and has not lived up to Princess Diana’s stature as a fashion icon.
For a nation eagerly anticipating the birth of a second child to the 33-year-old Duchess and Prince William, the most attractive royal couple since Charles met Diana, those are fighting words.
“I think she dresses quite uneventfully,” said the Canadian literary icon, whose new book The Heart Goes Last is to be released in September. “I think she’s watching her back. I think she probably has people who pretty much tell her what is appropriate for her to wear. I don’t think she’s become the fashion plate that Diana was, and I think she’s probably doing that advisedly, wouldn’t you say?”
As video of the recent exchange circulated on the Internet, royal watchers leapt to defend the Duchess.
“You’re a bit limited if you’re a member of the Royal Family. You’ve got to dress as if you’re going to a wedding every day,” Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, told the U.K. newspaper Express. “I think Kate’s style is really classic and elegant.”
Fashion writer Susan Kelley, who runs a website devoted to Kate’s clothing and the sales bump that inevitably follows her appearance in a new outfit, noted in the same report that Diana was much younger when she became a princess, had less time to develop her own style, and as a result was more influenced by trends of the day.
The reaction recalls the episode in 2013 when Hilary Mantel, also a Booker winner and author of historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, described the Duchess of Cambridge as “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.” She later said the comments were taken out of context to create an outrage where none existed, and in fact her speech urged reporters not to do to Kate what they did to Diana.
Those comments were also delivered at a London mu- seum, in Ms. Mantel’s case the British Museum. In both cases, the comments were directly on topic, though both have been described as cranky outbursts.
Ms. Atwood’s comments came after a talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which coincided with an exhibit on the clothing of the late designer Alexander McQueen. She was being interviewed on the theme of clothing in literature, and the history of clothing and related laws, especially clothing people do not choose to wear, such as prison uniforms.
She illustrated it with a slide show of photos taken throughout her life, often in clothing she made herself, as an avid dressmaker, such as one long winter coat from 1970 that she said was typically worn with a mini skirt and high boots.
Ms. Atwood also revealed she cannot type without looking, which relates to her interest in dressmaking because she chose home economics over secretarial sciences early in her schooling, on the grounds that the older girls in secretarial sciences were too intimidating, with their cigarettes and their boyfriends’ jackets.
On clothing, she described the many ways clothing plays a part in her stories, as a symbol or revealing detail, and how she tends to judge characters by their initial physical appearance. Some authors feed their characters, she observed, others do not, according to their interests. In Dashiell Hammett, for example, no one eats, she said, but Robertson Davies describes entire meals.
“I think clothes are the same,” Ms. Atwood said.
In one British press report, this was described as her having “confessed that she judged women on what they wore.” Another noted with a hint of skepticism that Ms. Atwood “has been described as a feminist writer.”
Similar reactions greeted the writer Joan Smith when she called Kate as “unambitious” and “bland” as any footballer’s wife, and the comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig when she said Kate had no opinions and was “very Jane Austen.”
For female authors tempted to criticize the appearance of royals, this episode is just the latest demonstration of what happens when they fail to tread lightly around the dresses of princesses.