Meghan has great charm. At first, as she performed her royal duties she came across as warm, kind, down-to-earth, sweet, modest, and eager to please. Her first post-marital engagement without Harry was to join Queen on the royal train to Chester in the northwest of England. The monarch had a full schedule of engagements, from unveiling a plaque declaring open the Hatton Bridge which crosses the Don River, to inspecting a group of Syrian refugees doing traditional craftwork, a dance performance by a group of local recovering addicts called Fallen Angels, performances of set pieces from a production of A Little Night Music, local primary school children performing songs alongside actors from the 2016 film Swallows and Amazons which was first published by Arthur Ransome in 1930, at which point the Queen unveiled the second plaque of the day before the two women headed into lunch at Chester Town Hall as guests of honour of the Chester City Council. They also went on a walkabout, the Queen working the crowds to the right while Meghan was instructed to walk to the left. Royal aides informed the press that Elizabeth II had asked her new granddaughter-in-law along specifically to show her ‘the breadth of work the Royal Family carries out.’ Meghan said how pleased she was to be there, and the Queen, notably undemonstrative as a matter of course, was unusually animated, smiling up a storm and laughing at Meghan’s asides when they were seated together.
Although the press judged the event a great success, those who were more dispassionate queried Meghan’s boycotting of royal attire. The Queen was dressed in one of her typical outfits, a mint green Stewart Parvin coat over a silk floral dress with a matching Rachel Trevor Morgan hat and the inevitable white gloves, pearls and diamond brooch. Meghan wore an off-white Givenchy dress with a black belt, black clutch bag, and black shoes. While she looked chic, she did not look royal, and, to those in the know, she had broken several sartorial guidelines:
She had worn no hat when the custom is for royal women to wear hats on such occasions, especially when accompanying the Queen;
She had worn black and white, which are two of the royal mourning colours, along with mauve;
She had worn a French designer, not a British, which was in breach of the protocol whereby British royals wear British designers to drum up support for British trade when on royal duties. While it had been just about acceptable for her to wear a wedding dress from the French couturier because its designer was British, the same did not hold true for everyday attire.
While it was some comfort that the press did not revile Meghan for the breaches, they did notice that she had ignored royal protocol for what was her introductory engagement with Her Majesty. This was hardly the way to garner praise, yet Meghan seemed so eager to please that she was given the benefit of the doubt. Behind the scenes, however, those of us in the know soon learnt that Angela Kelly, the Queen’s dresser, personal designer, and even more importantly personal friend, had rung Meghan up and informed her that the Queen would be wearing a hat, which was palace-speak for you are to wear one too. Meghan had informed her that she would not be wearing one, and that was that. Was this a sign of a policy of deliberate disregard on her part for the traditions of the institution into which she had married, or was it an unintended slight born of ignorance? Since Meghan was known to have always fulfilled the sartorial demands of the producers of her television shows and films when she was promoting a product on their behalf, could this be an early display of independence, and a message that she would not be abiding by the traditions of the monarchy but would be making up her own rules as and when she wanted? Recently, there had been so many little signs that she did not feel it necessary to be constrained by any rules of conduct but her own, chief of which had been her failure to curtsy to the Queen on her wedding day following the signing of the register at St. George’s Chapel.
Soon it emerged that Meghan had indeed chosen to devise her own protocol where attire was concerned. Despite being undeniably stylish and chic, her choice of colours was more New York Seventh Avenue than House of Windsor or, come to it, Houses of Orange, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bernadotte, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg-Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluckstein, Bernadotte, or Grimaldi. As she appeared in public more and more, it was as if she were starring in her own interpretation of a sit-com in which a chic American woman decides that she is too stylish to be bothered to respect the sartorial mores of the institution into which she has married. Not surprisingly, the British press noticed. They knew only too well that royal women usually wear coloured garments so that they will stand out in a crowd. It is deemed polite that you make yourself visible to those who have taken the trouble to come to see you. It is one of the many minor and unspoken protocols, based upon consideration, under which all royal women function. It is a form of respect for the public, and disregarding the protocol disrespects both the public and the sentiment behind the custom.
Although colour suits Meghan, her concept of chic is very French bourgeois: a mode of attire that crossed the Atlantic seventy years ago and has become engraved on the hearts and minds of those fashionistas whose taste is circumscribed by safety and a reverence
