Princess Kate always manages to look effortless, whether it’s wearing a tailored Alexander McQueen coat dress or jeans and a Breton striped top. It might seem like the outfits members of the Royal Family wear are out of reach for the average person, but you don’t need high-end designer brands to achieve the same look if you follow some of the same styling hacks.
Fashion expert Monica Marriott-Mills recently shared some of the Royal Family’s biggest styling secrets on Instagram, and she says that one “lazy girl styling hack” is especially easy for everyday women to pull off.
“If you can color match your bag to your shoes, and wear no more than three colors in total, your outfit will just work,” she says in a Reel explaining how to achieve the look—and it’s a trick that the Princess of Wales uses all the time.
If you’re a regular follower of Kate’s style, you already know that she loves to coordinate her heels to her handbag. “This style of dressing is really impactful and it’s also something that we as fashion lovers and onlookers of the royals can also add into our own everyday style,” Marriott-Mills tells Marie Claire.
Take the 2026 Wimbledon finals, when the Princess of Wales demonstrated the tactic by wearing solid color dresses with tan handbags and heels, creating a classic, streamlined outfit that Marriott-Mills says anyone can copy with their own pieces.
“What’s great about the princess is that she often wears her bags and shoes time and time again,” the fashion content creator says.
Marriott-Mills, who specializes in luxury, royal and slow fashion, adds that when Kate “matches her bags to her shoes,” she can then wear that same combination with a different color palette. “It enables her to reuse them and style them up for lots of different occasions and in diverse ways,” Marriott-Mills says.
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Similarly to matching their shoes to their handbags, Marriott-Mills says royal women also adopt the sandwich method—for example, matching their shoes and their top and using a different color for their skirt or trousers. “The top and bottom are like pieces of bread, they always need to match,” she explains.
Another one of the Royal Family's favorite fashion tactics is to go full monochromatic, like the Princess of Wales did for Commonwealth Day 2026, taking the coordinating shoe and bag further by creating a totally streamlined color story from head to toe.
Marriott-Mills adds that a trick Princess Kate uses to elevate her more affordable outfits is to add luxury accessories to her high street clothing. Pointing to the red tweed blazer she wore for a 2022 trip to Copenhagen with a black Aspinal of London Midi Mayfair bag, the fashion expert says the royal's “whole outfit feels really elevated—you would never know her blazer was under 70 pounds from Zara.”
And on top of it, the princess matched her bag to her black pumps, combining two styling hacks in one.
