Can you believe that those people are STILL talking about the Duchess of Sussex’s red dress at the LA Children’s Hospital gala two weekends ago? For real. To be fair, this Mail piece which we’re about to discuss came out on the one-week anniversary of The Dress Which Brought Down a Nation. Hopefully, they spent one full week screaming, crying and throwing up about Meghan looking hot and now they can move on? What am I saying, of course they won’t move on. They’re still going to be talking about Meghan in this dress years from now. Meghan’s red dress has now acquired the kind of iconic status reserved for Princess Diana’s “revenge dress.”
She famously idolised Diana when she was growing up, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that when the moment came for Meghan to relaunch herself last week, she seemingly turned to her late mother-in-law’s playbook, and chose a dress that spoke a thousand words. Namely, a flesh-flashing red number, with a distinctly unregal thigh-high split.
After a stream of disobliging headlines – Meghan was recently accused of being a martinet of a boss who ‘reduced grown men to tears’, as well as enduring the status of her marriage to Harry being questioned in several, varying US publications – Meghan has apparently decided to hit back against the haters.
According to one Californian source, she’s done so with a spectacular ‘revenge dress’, rather like that figure-hugging black number Diana famously wore to London’s Serpentine Gallery after Charles confessed to adultery on television, and she launched her own new independent public life. Wearing a revamped version of a Carolina Herrera dress she had previously worn with Harry to a red-carpet event, Meghan held all eyes – certainly the audacious split hadn’t been so obvious when the dress had a train.
That Californian source told me: ‘The belief is that this red dress is Meghan’s version of Diana’s revenge dress. Physically this looks like a new Meghan, as if she is moving on towards a new chapter. Some feel it’s no accident.’
Indeed, Meghan’s whole look was different: her hallmark teetering shoes were open-toed, and her hair – usually in a tight and polished bun for such events – was in loose waves. She seems to have been leaning hard into a ‘funky young mom’ vibe, thus moving away from the ‘Duchess Difficult’ allegations about her management style, which had dominated the headlines the previous week. This gorgeous creature, with her freckled shoulders and cute curls could not, surely, be a mean boss? (Indeed, employees of hers then went out of their way to publicly praise her ‘kindness’ in an article for People magazine that was seen as an attempt to redress the unfavourable article in the Hollywood Reporter.)
This, then, is Meghan at a pivotal point in her life outside the Royal Family: as she posed alone for the cameras at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles 2024 Gala on Saturday night, she looked more like the Hollywood star she’s always wanted to be, rather than a member of The Firm. Job done, one might say.
The thing about Diana’s revenge dress is that she timed everything perfectly and the message was perfectly clear: Diana looked sexy and vivacious on the same night her husband confessed to his long-standing affair with Camilla, a woman Diana called “the Rottweiler.” The comparison with Meghan is that… she’s getting revenge on the Windsors? Revenge on the courtiers who smeared her as “duchess difficult?” Who is the target of Meghan’s revenge? This reminds me of something I’ve mentioned before – British commentators have zero imagination and their inability to place Harry and Meghan within a historical framework has caused a lot of malfunctioning royalists. They’re out here comparing Harry to King Edward VIII and Meghan is being compared to Diana.
Photos courtesy of Getty.