Is Liz Jones turning into Kate?
She’s 20 years older and prides herself on being at fashion’s cutting edge. But LIZ JONES says even she’s unconsciously fallen victim to the Kate effect
MONDAY morning started much like any other. I had been photographed for this newspaper’s Life & Style section wearing a long split skirt. I was meant to be copying Angelina Jolie’s split-skirted look at the Oscars. But it seems my aim misfired. Spectacularly.
The long snake of comments below my story on the Mail’s website and the emails that popped into my inbox all said the same thing — I’d been transformed into none other than the Duchess of Cambridge.
‘All you need is a giant sapphire!’ typed my best friend. ‘What has happened to you: the big hair, the tiny legs, the even smaller waist?’ wrote another. ‘Wow!’ was the oneword email from another friend.
Wow indeed. If I have morphed into a Middleton, then there are a lot worse things I could be. Kate is unbelievably beautiful. She is 20 years my junior. She exudes from every tiny pore a wholesome niceness. She is not a flirt, a la Carla Bruni; she is not sexy or ridiculously demure and shy, like a young Diana.
She is not boisterous and horsey, or impossibly, off-puttingly posh. No, our Kate is resolutely middle- class. She is hard-working. I can sniff her gimlet-eyed ambition.
I hadn’t realised it before, but we are shockingly alike in our approach to life. We both want nice things. We want to escape our ordinary past (mine, Chelmsford, Essex; hers, Bucklebury, Berkshire). We believe in fairytale romance.
So, yes, I might have Kate’s morals and determination, but do we really look alike? Have I unwittingly aped her style: all lowheeled patent pumps, jersey wrap dresses and long, Dallas-worthy locks?
I had thought I was much more edgy than super-safe Kate: I have long favoured lowslung hipster trousers and dangerous Prada heels, not neat coat dresses and LK Bennett. I have long railed at Kate for not spending enough money on clothes: she is resolutely middle market (Hobbs, Jaeger) rather than high end, which is the murky water I swim in, trying to keep my mouth above water as I juggle my credit cards.
BUTher power of persuasion, the way she has quietly crept under all our skins almost unnoticed, has meant an increasing number of women, young and, ahem, not so young, feel it is more important to look smart, appropriate and pretty rather than turn up, as Stella Mccartney did for the Olympics kit launch, in print pyjamas.
Kate has transcended trends to shoot straight to classic — which is something I favour, too. Those of us without the desire or the inclination to look like Alexa Chung have our very own head girl.
But (and you knew there would be a but) there is a dangerous, rather more worrying side to the fact we all, me included, want to look like Kate.
Like Samantha Cameron and Victoria Beckham — two other glossy, high-achieving brunettes — Kate seems to have bought into the idea that being in the public eye, being photographed from every angle, means being incredibly thin.
I’d wager she is smaller than I am, which is a size eight (she’s also a couple of inches taller). Word has it Sarah Burton, who designed her bridal gown, had to take in the waist again and again as the wedding hovered nearer.
Why is Kate’s enviable tiny waist worrying? Because impressionable women, those not protected by a great family, love or self- esteem, will have looked at Kate in those skinny jeans as she played hockey in flats the other day and thought: ‘I want to look like that.’
The problem is that Kate’s beauty is so down-to-earth, so natural (unlike mine, please see below), that women think it’s attainable.
Heck, we can even afford to buy what she wears, given she shops in places like Hobbs, which is why everything she wears sells out.
I think Kate is potentially more dangerously seductive than Diana, than Grace Kelly, than Kate Moss, than Alexa Chung, simply because her beauty and style seem so attainable. She is one of us.
Hell, if even an old cynic like me can be seduced so effortlessly, so subliminally, then what hope the anxious, directionless teen poised on the brink of adulthood?
Yes, copy Kate’s niceness, the fact she is quick to smile. But please leave the dieting, grooming and credit- card bashing to insane doppelgangers like me.
Here’s how I got the look . . .
HAIR
FOR many years, I ironed my hair to a jet black crisp and, not surprisingly it became a dry-as-tinder nest.
Kate’s hair colour, a glossy chocolate brown with subtle, very expensive highlights, suddenly seems so much more flattering. Her gentle, rather old- fashioned wave, which reminds me of Pamela Ewing in Dallas, is altogether more forgiving on the face.
Kate and I have big heads (with large, intelligent brains). She gets her hair done at Richard Ward, on the King’s Road, but I favour Louise Galvin, who is responsible for keeping Samantha Cameron conker-coloured.
BROWS
NOW, I think I got my brows first. Mine were over-plucked in the Seventies, so a few years ago, I had them tattooed with semi- permanent make- up, which lasts about a year. Dye is injected into the surface of the skin, which creates tiny scabs. They heal after a week or so, then drop off. Now, as Kate’s eyebrows seem to be getting bushier and darker, it