Who Are You Wearing, Kate?

After binge-watching the latest season of The Crown, I became obsessed with scouring the internet looking for pictures of Kate Middleton during her stint in Fife, desperate to recreate her effortless, cool-girl chic. Her graduation look is a favourite of mine (and one I will attempt to emulate come 2026), in which she manages to make the (rather boring) white-shirt-black-skirt combo look like the epitome of high fashion. From her pair of black kitten heels to the mini Longchamp draped on her arm and her ever-perfect glossy locks, Kate definitely turned heads as she collected her diploma. 

However, twenty years on, it appears that turning heads is exactly what the Princess of Wales wants to avoid. After years of looking gorgeous and fashionable on tabloid front pages, perfectly tailored and covered in designer yet still dressed in a way the public could imitate, the Princess’s office has announced that they will no longer be briefing details of her outfits. It seems she thinks that all we’ve gleaned from these front page spreads is the perfect tailoring of her oversized blazer, and not the acts of public charity she was performing. In other words, we’ve valued her style over her substance. 

Since Kate’s formal introduction into the Royal Family following her glamorous royal wedding in April 2011, Kensington Palace has routinely briefed the details of the Princess’s clothing to the media. However, as she resumes her royal duties after a difficult year of cancer treatment, it appears Kate is no longer bothered about which brands she dresses herself in, and believes we shouldn’t be either. In a video message issued by the Palace in September, which confirmed Kate’s completion of a course of preventative chemo, she described how her experience of cancer treatment has given her a “new perspective on everything”, and perhaps, after such a gruelling experience, clothes just don’t seem as important. 

A Palace source told The Times that “there is an absolute feeling that it [the public work] is not about what the princess is wearing”. It’s clear that she attempted to highlight this sentiment on a recent visit to the National Portrait Gallery, where she accompanied Princess Charlotte on a school trip. Opting for a combination of grey-on-grey, which she then cloaked in an even more indeterminate oversized brown blazer, she was clearly attempting not to shine. Yet, the irony lies in the fact that she still looked amazing. With her perfect blowout, her clothes tailored so flawlessly that they go from dull to classic, and the hordes of paparazzi that I’m sure accompanied this visit, she doesn’t exactly pull off anonymity. 

I find the Princess’s wishes to distance herself from her status as the leading individual in British fashion quite surprising. Her clothes are her armour, albeit rather expensive and bedazzled. They are the vehicle through which she gets us to notice her very substantial public charity work. Whilst it may be her exquisite Prince of Wales check dress with the pussycat bow that makes the headline, the article is bound to mention that she was photographed in it whilst visiting children in a cancer hospice. Her ability to consistently grab the attention of the British public should not be something she wishes to repel, but something she should attempt to harness. 

There is definitely nothing trivial about dressing perfectly. Not every royal has always got it right (cough cough, Beatrice and Eugenie with their unfortunate hat choices), and so consistently mixing aspirational and relatable, modest yet attractive, is no mean feat. Trivialising fashion’s effect to shift public opinion feels pretty much like veiled misogyny on behalf of the Princess’s advisors, too. Are pretty dresses just silly distractions from important things? No. Those dresses spotlight British designers, arrest public attention (which can then be redirected to the event at which the dress was worn), and can be used to curate one’s public image. I think that for the Princess of Wales and her team to underestimate and trivialise the power she holds when she (or whoever does it for her) picks her clothes in the morning would be a big mistake indeed. 

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia