Hamish Bowles on the varied reactions to Oprah’s interview on both sides of the pond, and the sartorial similarities between Meghan, Wallis Simpson, and Princess Diana.
A Brit in America Makes Sense of the Meghan Markle Oprah Interview
Before I settled in to watch Oprah’s Sunday night interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex three nights ago, I had intended to write a story about her subjects’ style choices for the interview. Straddling the ocean as I have the past year, half the time at home in Manhattan, half the time in the English countryside, I have found myself torn between two very different readings of this extraordinary couple. In America, a version of Meghan as a self-actualized style maven with a platform of female empowerment, who seemed to have brought her unhappy prince and his demons to a happy place. In Britain, a sense that she was a wily, shrewish manipulator (“Hurricane Meghan”) who snared her well-meaning but unwary prince, dazzled by the idea of the job, but discovered too late its dreary restrictive realities and its focus on blindly unquestioning obedience and embrace of duty, and stole him away to a distant land of self love, self realization, and humbug. To be perfectly frank I was somewhat ambivalent myself: the relentless onslaught of the British tabloid press is difficult to resist, try as one might. It’s a juggernaut.
So let’s get the clothes and their messaging out of the way first. Prince Harry, stripped now of his uniforms, but embracing the Montecito lifestyle in degage J. Crew, Meghan channeling the Duchess of Windsor in a pregnancy-appropriate Giorgio Armani triple silk georgette dress with an abstract print splosh that apparently represented lotus flowers (symbolizing “enlightenment, self-regeneration and rebirth,” as Town & Country assured me). She accented the dress with a trio of aquamarine teardrops from Pippa Small that she’d previously worn in Tonga during the couple’s 2018 tour—when she proved to be such a popular, telegenic whizz at the job that “The Institution'' [the Palace administrative infrastructure] (or was it “The Firm” [the Royal family and key courtiers and advisors]?) apparently balked, and the problems began—and a diamond tennis bracelet that appeared to have been the one that had belonged to her late mother-in-law whose own star turn in the Antipodes in 1983 similarly signalled the beginning of the end of her own very short lived honeymoon with The Firm, and indeed her husband (see The Crown, Season 3, Episode 6, Terra Nullius). Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, finished it all off with fiendishly vertiginous Aquazzura stiletto heels that seemed ill-suited to the manicured lawns of the neighboring friend’s garden where the trio found themselves, shaded by a verdant brick pergola from the glorious California light, but perhaps were intended to suggest that the wearer was not to be trifled with. The Duchess of Windsor, I was reminded, had the soles of her shoes polished in case they were revealed when she crossed her ankles.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Hamish Bowles
