Call it a tale of two royal weekends: One draped in solemn tradition, the other all Hollywood glitz. Both make for a fascinating case study in the increasingly divergent paths two branches of the House of Windsor are taking.
On one side of the pond we have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who popped up at not one but two glitzy Los Angeles society events this past Saturday night. First, they stopped by Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner’s 70th birthday — hosted at Jeff Bezos’s pad, James Bond themed — before a jacket change for Harry and an appearance at the Baby 2 Baby charity gala, where Meghan’s longtime pal Serena Williams was the guest of honour.
While, about 9,000 kilometres away, the Princess of Wales spent her Saturday evening at the annual Festival of Remembrance, a concert at Royal Albert Hall honouring Commonwealth veterans that’s a tent-pole event in the family’s calendar. In a significant first, 12-year-old Prince George joined her in the royal box, sitting front row with King Charles and Queen Camilla.
The next day, Prince William — who’d been held up the night before taking a commercial flight back from his Earthshot Prize award ceremony in Brazil — was back on hand to lay a wreath at a Remembrance Sunday service, his wife watching from a balcony nearby.
The very public outing for Prince George, albeit carefully managed by his mother, brings us to another example of how these couples have chosen different ways to negotiate the same problem. In this case, it’s how to raise children born into a fame they didn’t choose, and which — from the parent’s own experience — often harms more than it helps. Prince William and Princess Catherine have chosen a sort of managed exposure, acclimating their kids to public life while fiercely guarding their personal lives. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, in a way, have chosen the inverse: We’ve only seen the backs of Archie and Lilibet, but we’ve also seen them on social media in more personal moments, like picking pumpkins or running around the garden at home.
In keeping with the couples’ very different weekend plans, their clothing choices were also a study in contrasts: Meghan appears to have worn (new to us) custom Balenciaga, while her sister-in-law debuted another dress by favourite designer Alessandra Rich on Saturday evening, then re-wearing a Catherine Walker number seen at this same service in 2022.
Both epitomize their very different styles — minimalist and sleek for Meghan, big collars and coat dresses for Kate — but their choice of jewelry also clearly speaks to their different approaches: The Princess of Wales was decked out in family heirlooms (one pair of earrings belonging to the late Queen Elizabeth, the other a gift to William’s mother, Diana, when she got married), while the Duchess of Sussex wore earrings from the fashion house Aquazurra.
For the men in the party: Prince Harry wore suit jackets with a poppy lapel pin his only adornment. His older brother, on the other hand, wore a military uniform, complete with various medals signifying the regiments for which he holds honorary leadership roles, to perform this ceremonial duty. As we know, when Harry left the royal fold, he was removed of all his honorary military titles and is no longer allowed to wear his military uniform at official events — not that he’s attending any in Montecito.
The weekend’s events and wardrobe choices are very representative of the modes that we now mainly see both couples operating in when in public. Meghan and Harry are found in the sorts of places you’d see any other celebrity, like in the owner’s box at a World Series game, at galas or appearing on podcasts. Will and Kate, by contrast, are determined to be visible only when they’re on the clock royal-ing — and any intrusion on that, as with the lawsuit they recently settled with a European outlet that published photographs of the family on holiday in Switzerland, tends to invite a lawyer’s letter rather than a pose for the step-and-repeat.
This is not to say that Prince Harry, in particular, has forsaken the causes that he championed as a working royal. It’s just that now, maybe learning from the missteps of their Global Philanthropist era early on in their post-working-Windsor life, he’s doing it as a private citizen rather than someone who looks like he’s setting up a rival royal system across the pond. His recent trip to Toronto to mark Remembrance Day by visiting veterans and service members, which took place entirely behind closed doors with nary a walkabout in sight, reads more like any other well-intentioned celebrity doing good work than the “we must be seen to be believed” public engagements the actual working royals peg their public perception around.
This divergence in the two couples’ paths isn’t anything surprising, of course. It’s a direct result of the lives they’ve both chosen, and one that will only grow as Will and Kate move higher up The Firm’s org chart, and Meghan and Harry become more and more entrenched in the commercial realities of supporting yourself when you’re extremely famous but don’t have the institutional resources you need to protect yourself from everything that comes with that. Also: This was Meghan’s chosen milieu for far longer than the unhappy years she spent as a working Windsor wife.
It feels telling that in the same week that Meghan went back to work as an actor while celebrating the fact that her lifestyle company, As Ever, is one of Oprah’s favourite things, Kate was shepherding her oldest child through one of his first big steps into the enormous role that he’ll inherit one day. Two women, two very different choices.
And, given the fact that there seems to be no sign of a thawing of relations between William and Harry — and both seem to be happy with the lot they’ve chosen — these are two paths that will only continue to move further and further away from each other.
