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We’re all fascinated by Kate’s pre-royal wardobe, says Laura Antonia Jordan
SHOULD YOU WANT proof of the Princess of Wales’s evolving style confidence, consider her current fondness for caped dresses. November’s red-hot Catherine Walker to meet the President and First Lady of South Korea, or teal Safiyaa for the Royal Variety Performance, show a woman who is in control of her fashion narrative. Hers is a sleek ’n’ chic style that is so self-assured she looks as if she was born to do it.
So much so that it’s easy to forget that, well, she wasn’t (that is, if you adhere to the rigid rules of British society). Next April marks the 20th anniversary of the first published pictures of the then-Kate Middleton and Prince William together. ‘Finally… Wills gets a girl’ trilled The Sun with a picture of the young couple skiing at Klosters.
It is that Kate – the St Andrews student Kate, the pre-title not-world-famous-yet Kate – who takes centre stage in the final part of the final season of The Crown. And it was that Kate (played by Meg Bellamy) who costume designers Amy Roberts and Sidonie Roberts were tasked with interpreting for screen.
The duo have masterminded The Crown’s vast wardrobes since season three, from the 1960s to early noughties, but Kate was a unique proposition, both challenging and liberating. Having been outfitting characters of whom millions of images exist, photos of private, pre-profile Middleton were harder to find. ‘I do think it’s interesting from a costume perspective because you’re catching Kate before she’s in the public domain,’ says Sidonie. ‘In a way it was quite refreshing because the fewer images we had allowed us to have more of a flight of imagination’.
The early noughties time frame also posed a challenge. ‘We always call it no-man’s land. It’s a really odd decade for fashion,’ says Sidonie. Amy’s motto, ‘clothes not costume’, or realism over clichés, helped them nail the task. As did Sidonie’s first-hand experience of the time. ‘You have to get a sense of who that girl was and then remember the girls at my school who dressed like that, the nuances you know because you’ve lived them,’ she says.
It’s the specificities and detail that will make the Kate looks feel familiar – uncomfortably so for many of us. ‘So much of Kate’s silhouette is in those boot-cut jeans!’ laughs Sidonie, who regularly found herself trawl
