Diane von Furstenberg has weighed in on the alleged royal rift between the Duchess of Sussex and the Princess of Wales. Now, the designer has reminded her followers that, based on their fashion choices, the women aren’t so different after all.
The 75-year-old Belgian fashion designer took to Instagram on Saturday, where she posted two images of Princess Kate and Meghan Markle wearing the same lace dress from her DVF brand.
“Once upon a time two beautiful women married two kind and handsome princes…(here both wearing the same @dvf dress called Zorita),” she captioned the post. “Wishing them all peace and love for the new year!”
Meghan first wore a cocktail-length version of the navy “Zarita” dress to a USA Network event in 2012. She paired the lace dress with nude pumps and had honey highlights in her hair.
The duchess previously told Glamour UK that she wasn’t too proud of the fashion moment, recalling: “I was going to this event and there was this DVF lace dress with a zipper up the back, and it was so fitted, and had tea-length sleeves. I bought one in navy and black. It was too tight, and too short, and my hair was too polished, and everything about it was trying too hard.”
Two years later, the now Princess of Wales wore a full-length version of the black lace Zarita dress to the Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium Theatre in London in November 2014. One month later, she wore the DVF gown again to a friend’s wedding at Chelsea Old Church in west London.
Princess Kate appears to be a fan of the lace dress, having worn it for a third time to the Anna Freud National Centre gala at Kensington Palace in November 2017 and once more for dinner with the late Queen Elizabeth II and Duke of Edinburgh to celebrate their 70th anniversary.
Following von Furstenberg’s post, fans and followers praised the designer for “healing the world” as she showed the two royals in the same dress.
“Diane Von Furstenberg has healed the world with a single Instagram post,” writer Hannah Tindle jokingly tweeted on Sunday.
“Beautifully said,” commented one user under DVF’s post, alongside two red heart emojis.
“Thank you for the empowerment here. We need more people like this,” another fan wrote.
“They both look great in the dress!!!” said someone else.
The fashion designer’s post comes after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex debuted their highly-anticipated Netflix docuseries, titled Harry and Meghan. The six-part documentary series saw Meghan speak about some of her fashion choices throughout her years as a working royal.
In episode three of the docuseries, she explained how members of the royal family can never “wear the same colour as Her Majesty if there’s a group event”.
“But then, you also should never be wearing the same colour as one of the other more senior members of the family,” Meghan said, before describing the colours she chose to wear at the time as an effort to “blend in” to the family.
“So I was like: ‘Well, what’s a colour that they’ll probably never wear?’” she recalled. “Camel? Beige? White? So I wore a lot of muted tones, but it was also so I could just blend in. Like, I’m not trying to stand out here. So there’s no version of me joining this family and trying to not do everything I could to fit in.”
However, during their last week as senior royals in March 2020, Meghan revealed that she wore many different colours during her final royal engagements, because she wanted to “look like a rainbow.”
“Until that last week in the UK, I rarely wore colour,” she said. “I never wanted to upstage or ruffle any feathers. So I just tried to blend in.”
“But I wore a lot of colour that week. I just felt like: ‘Let’s just look like a rainbow.’”
The first three episodes Harry and Meghan landed on Netflix on 8 December, followed by the final three episodes on 15 December. You can read the six biggest talking points from volume two of the docuseries here.
