The Duchess of Sussex went with Prince Harry on several overseas tours before they stepped back as working royals and a choice she made on one of them apparently didn’t go down too well with her grandmother-in-law. In February 2019, Harry and Meghan went on a three-day visit to Morocco.
As is almost inevitable whenever any of the senior royal women go anywhere, Meghan’s outfits received plenty of attention. None more so than the custom Christian Dior dress she wore to a reception at the British Ambassador’s residence in Rabat.
Writing in The Windsor Legacy, royal author Robert Jobson states the Duchess of Sussex’s expensive wardrobe was "raising eyebrows". He claims her Dior dress with an "estimated £60,000 price tag drew the Queen’s ire when she read about it in the press".
According to Jobson, Queen Elizabeth "later let Meghan know that such an expensive outfit was an ill-judged choice" after this revelation. The late monarch was famously practical and relatively frugal with her own clothing, with Princess Anne saying in 2022 that they’d discussed the difference between fashion and I style.
"She didn't do fashion but she certainly does style, and style tends to last longer," Anne added.
Perhaps growing up in wartime also inspired Queen Elizabeth’s preference for classic pieces and not being ostentatious with her clothing. Her warning to Meghan over wearing such an expensive gown on an official tour wasn’t the only time that the monarch and Duchess are said to have disagreed on matters of style.
It’s been widely reported that Meghan Markle wished to wear a specific tiara for her wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018. As Jobson describes it, "the Queen’s trusted dresser, Angela Kelly, refused" to allow this "over concerns about its Russian origins".
He writes that the "stress was eating away" at the Sussexes and claims that Harry "even snapped at Kelly, leading the Queen to explain to Harry that the tiara could not be used by Meghan". It was "not only a question of provenance, but also due to seniority".
As the wife of Prince William, who is now first in the line of succession, Kate is higher ranking than Meghan and so is Queen Camilla. The Duchess is also not a Princess by birth unlike Harry’s cousins Eugenie and Beatrice, and Eugenie was allowed to wear the Greville Emerald Kokoshnik Tiara at her own wedding five months later.
Despite the suggestions made in The Windsor Legacy, Harry recalled the tiara-choosing process as going a little differently in his memoir, Spare. He and Meghan went into the Queen’s private dressing room with her and Angela Kelly and were shown options.
"Granny said to Meg quite tenderly: Tiaras suit you. Meg melted," he wrote, saying that the tiara she picked was "seemingly made" for his now-wife.
The Duchess of Sussex wore Queen Mary’s Bandeau Tiara on her wedding day which is pave-set with large and small diamonds and has a detachable brooch at the centre. It was made in 1932 for Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, and Meghan is the only royal in recent generations to wear it on her wedding day.
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