Think back to everything that was happening around the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2022. Meghan launched her wildly successful podcast, Archetypes. H&M went to The Hague for the Invictus Games and they were widely praised and they got tons of great press. QEII made a point of inviting them personally to her Jubilee festivities, and the Sussexes also visited her quietly before the Invictus Games. Harry’s memoir was originally scheduled to be released towards the end of 2022 (it ended up being delayed to January 2023). And their Netflix docuseries came out in December 2022. In addition to all of that, Meghan appeared at One Young World summit in Manchester, and H&M intended to turn the trip into a mini-tour with charity visits… and then QEII died in the middle of their trip.
My point with this stroll down memory lane is that Harry & Meghan were booked and busy. Meghan was heavily promoting her podcast in the summer of 2022, and she even gave some magazine cover interviews to The Cut and Variety. In the past week, the British media has become obsessed with the idea that Meghan threw an enormous tantrum about wanting to appear on the cover of British Vogue that summer. At first, the story was that Meghan approached Edward Enninful (then the editor-in-chief of British Vogue) about a possible cover or feature, and he turned her down for a cover, so she turned him down for a feature, which made Conde Nast mad, because they really wanted her to do something? Then the story morphed into something about Meghan “threw her toys out of the pram” by demanding a cover, all to promote her appearance at One Young World. Now Page Six has added to the absurd story by claiming that Meghan hopped on a Zoom call with Anna Wintour in her bid to get the cover!
The alleged rift between Megan Markle and former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful goes deeper than him reportedly being unable to accommodate her for a cover in 2022, we hear. The former royal gave the fashion maven an impossible list of demands, and even tried to also appeal to US Vogue’s Anna Wintour, a source tells Page Six.
The Daily Mail reported this week that Markle and Enniful had plans for a UK Vogue September 2022 issue that would include Markle’s keynote appearance at the One Young World Summit in Manchester, and “involved extensive features across the magazine and its digital editions.”
The outlet reported that Markle wanted the cover, but Enniful already had a star, Linda Evangelista, booked — causing Markle to pull the plug and causing a falling out between the former friends. But we hear scheduling wasn’t the only reason the cover never materialized. A source tells us Markle wanted a “global cover,” appearing on the covers of UK and US Vogue simultaneously, along with a list of demands.
“Meghan asked for control over [the] photographer, writer, final edit, photos, cover lines, and wanted a global issue,” says a source. We hear there was no way any editor would agree. “Nobody gets that. Not even Beyoncé,” says the source.
We hear Markle even set up a personal Zoom call with Wintour in order to try and pitch her on the idea. “Anna wasn’t interested,” says the source, adding the mag already had its own cover star, Serena Williams. While Markle was not in the running, the source tells us: “Meghan asked for a Zoom with her to reconsider, and Anna did it to be polite.”
Adele is the only celebrity to appear on both US and UK covers simultaneously for the November 2021 issues.
However, another source insisted that Markle never sought a cover from Vogue, and that the mag had actually approached her multiple times after her wedding to Prince Harry. Enninful had previously asked Markle to be on the cover of British Vogue’s 2019 “Forces for Change” issue, but she chose to guest edit instead, the source said.
As I said last week, this lie-filled melodrama reads like a typical royal operation ahead of some big announcement for one of the left-behinds. It’s very much like the dumb “Meghan wants a Dior contract” debacle, which we soon learned was all about Camilla wearing a Dior tent and looking half in the bag. This storyline of “Meghan DEMANDED the global cover and she wanted full editorial control” is mind-numbingly stupid. Meghan wanted a global Vogue cover for… her speech in Manchester? For her podcast? No. This whole thing is about a story which will come out shortly. They’re going to put Camilla’s horse glamour or Kate’s buttons on the cover and then all of the royalists will be screaming “MEGHAN MUST BE FURIOUS!”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, cover courtesy of The Cut.
