Check her out! Thrifty Kate’s £16 dress
SHE has discovered that she is descended from miners and shop assistants after researching her family tree.
And the Duchess of Cambridge has clearly inherited the thriftiness of her ancestors – as she recycled a £16 houndstooth Zara dress on a visit to a university yesterday.
Kate, 39, revealed she has been looking back at four generations of the Middleton and Goldsmith families as part of her work into early childhood development.
Her mother Carole’s family – the Goldsmiths – came from real poverty, with coal miners, a carpenter, general labourer and shop worker among her ancestors. But her father Michael’s relatives had a far more comfortable upbringing. He is from a family of wealthy wool merchants which also boasted a pilot and a solicitor.
During the trip to University College London, the duchess met with academics from the Children of the 2020s project, which will track the lives of babies born in 2021 over five years and look at the effect of factors such as economic circumstances.
Kate, who paired her look with grey Hugo Boss heels, said: ‘Our early childhoods shape our adult lives and knowing more about what impacts this critical time is fundamental to understanding what we as a society can do to improve our future health.’
The mother of three was last seen in the Zara dress, which retailed at £89.99 before being reduced on sale, on a visit to Bradford last year.
Yesterday she told the researchers how she had noticed the impact of social issues closer to home after looking at her own family tree.
Professor Alissa Goodman, director of the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, said: ‘The conversation was about how you can see big changes in society and how much that’s affected... different generations.’
During royal life, Kate has focused on how difficulties in adulthood can be traced to childhood experiences.