When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex received such a great reception in Australia, I predicted that the royal courts and British media would crash out for at least a full month. That prediction keeps panning out. “Palace sources” are still, somehow, screaming and crying about a five-day visit which ended three weeks ago. But Meghan’s outfits! Merching! Pseudo-royal tour! They promised not to be half-in! Their titles!! THeY pRoMIsEd!! You’d think that “palace sources” would realize that there’s no way to put this toothpaste back in the tube – everyone saw that Harry and Meghan are still popular, everyone saw that the royals were idiots for how they treated Harry and Meghan, and everyone saw that H&M are free to do whatever they want without the royal peanut gallery chiming in. From Emily Andrews’ piece in Woman & Home:
[The Sussexes’] ‘royal tour’ to Australia two weeks ago looked, well… extremely royal. And while they have denied that the trip was to seek publicity, they certainly found it. They were feted at a children’s hospital in Melbourne, Meghan served lunch at a women’s refuge, Harry talked about fatherhood and mental health at an Australian rules football club, they sailed round iconic Sydney Harbour and Harry donned his medals for a sombre Last Post ceremony and wreath-laying at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It was a veritable royal-tour bingo full house. Except there was also money to be made.
Ahead of the tour, much was made of their paid-for speaking engagements – Harry at a mental-health summit (although aides later insisted he didn’t receive a fee) and Meghan at a women’s retreat, earning her an estimated £130,000.
But, as became clear, this was the tip of the iceberg for Meghan’s money-making plan – perhaps explaining why she changed clothes so many times, had so many photo opportunities and was even a guest judge on MasterChef Australia. Hours after she was meeting cancer sufferers and serving food to homeless women, it was revealed that Meghan was ‘merching’ the very clothes off her back via a new AI celebrity fashion portal that she is now investing in. Not just her £660 Karen Gee dress (an Australian designer, of course), but her £575 Real Fine Studio earrings and even her Christian Dior shoes.
Every time someone buys an item, the site gets a 10-25% cut – with Meghan receiving half. I’m not sure ‘tacky’ even begins to cover it. And it certainly explains why this initially ‘private’ and ‘low-key’ visit turned into a media circus. Meghan had to be seen to be believed – and sell her clothes!
Her page on the OneOff platform, where she is billed as ‘Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’, features dozens of pictures of her in recent months, many pointedly showing her hand-in-hand with the late Queen’s grandson (still fifth in line to the throne), and all with links to buy her outfits. Lest we forget (and, of course, recollections do vary), the late Queen said the Sussexes could not be ‘half in, half out’ royals because working royals cannot earn their own money (or merch their status), in order to preserve the clear blue water between public service and personal gain.
Despite the couple’s denial that the trip was for publicity, at Buckingham Palace there were eye-rolls and heavy sighs about the predictability of it all. One Palace source said, “It’s pretty outrageous behaviour, particularly in a realm where the King is Head of State, to drum up all this publicity for their commercial endeavours with royal-tour choreography. The whole point about being a working royal is that they do it for others and for public service, not their bank balance.”
So is it time they were stripped of their royal titles?
Outrageous behavior? To mix charity and commercial work as private citizens? Gasp! But the important part is this: “particularly in a realm where the King is Head of State…” As I said at the time, the crashouts were epic because Harry and Meghan dared to step foot in a British realm. Not only that, they went to Australia, the country which Prince William and Kate have refused to visit for over a decade. Instead of simply acknowledging that Will and Kate are lazy bums, these people have created this whole-ass coping mechanism of “but but but Meghan’s clothes, how dare she make money!”
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Her Best Life’s Instagram.
