Nothing wrong with a little healthy competition! According to royal fashion expert and author Elizabeth Holmes, Kate Middleton definitely stepped up her style game when Meghan Markle came around.
“I think Kate kicked up her fashion game in the fall of 2018, certainly after the royal wedding of Harry and Megan,” Holmes tells Us while appearing on Us Weekly’s series “Royally Us” to promote her new book HRH So Many Thoughts on Royal Style. “Kate had just had Louie and she went away on maternity leave for a couple months and came back and suddenly had a little bit more fashion in her wardrobe.”
Though Holmes says that this change could have been due to a variety of things, it was certainly interesting timing. “It’s impossible to say what inspired that,” she explains. “It could be just sort of bouncing back after having a baby or that she was working with some new fashion advisers. But I do think that Megan on the scene sort of made everything more exciting for both of them. And I love that Kate kind of stepped up her game!”
Then again, it’s no surprise that both women would naturally feel fashion pressure. After all, they did follow in the footsteps of their late mother-in-law Princess Diana. However, Holmes points out that the Princess of Wales didn’t always have such a keen sense of style.
“I think she learned a lot about fashion because you look at [her] wedding dress and you can place that it’s an eighties dress.” She notes the large fit, poofy sleeves and wrinkled material. “It was, I think, a 20-year-old girl’s idea of what a princess should dress like.”
Luckily, she grew out of this experience, becoming one of the most fashionable royals of all time. “The more she did in her royal life, I think that the more that she understood what worked for her, what worked for her body, what sort of image she wanted to project.” Once she got divorced, she got much more serious about what she wore. So, if she ever did marry again, Holmes believes the gown would look much different. “We would have seen her something much more streamlined than her first one.”
To hear more about royal wedding dresses, Princess Di’s biggest fashion faux pas and more fun royal style scoops, watch the entire video above!
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