Women don’t want to dress like Kate Middleton any more

Look, if you will, at Kate Middleton on the Isle of Mull for her wedding anniversary. There she was in skinny jeans, tucked-in blue shirt and tweed blazer, shod in what looked like sensible walking boots. It’s a look I like to call Royal Prep School Mummy, and she’s been at it for years: on school runs, at charity netball matches, and Anmer Hall photoshoots. It works, as it always has done, by combining registers. The tweed blazer nods to all sorts of Balmoral-ish, elitist accents – but we forget all about that because of the blue shirt and skinny jeans, items we might well own ourselves. Hilary Mantel may have famously called Kate a ‘shop window mannequin’, but I want to know which one. Joules, Boden or Cath Kidston?

Nowadays, haute-ordinary brands once associated with the princess’s soft power – such as Joules, Boden, and Cath Kidston, not to mention Orla Kiely and Jack Wills – are anachronisms. Most of them – bar Jack Wills, which is now worn almost exclusively by chavs – have gone bust. Cath Kidston, once the darling of the middle-class kitchen and downstairs loo with all its make-do-and-mend, chintzy, found-it-in-the-attic vibes, went into administration in 2020.

Most popular

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Oxford’s LTN farce

Michael Simmons

The rich are fleeing – what next?

Douglas Murray

Should you be arrested for reading The Spectator?

Joules – the brand first established as a market stall by founder Tom Joule, known for its Norfolk beach-striped raincoats and clean Breton tops – went down the pan not long after, in 2023. Both labels were bought out by Next – the hugely successful but doomed graveyard for troubled brands. Both cited Covid and lack of investment as reasons for their demise. But I think it’s simply that we have aged out of aspirational ordinariness – or, as one retail analyst at JP Morgan told me, ‘the brand DNA had withered’. Ouch.

In short, middle-class tastes have moved on. Where once Prep School Mummy might have wanted to emulate a clean-lines Kate vibe, these days she is far more likely to want to signal quiet wealth and a safe, don’t-scare-the-horses eccentricity: think an Aspiga quilted coat, barrel jeans (a nightmare for walking the dogs in the mud, just saying) and bright red Adidas Sambas. In warm weather, the jean hem will rise to wide-leg culottes and be paired with Penelope Chilvers espadrilles and a Maison Labiche top that she might have bought in Burford Garden Centre’s ladies’ fashion department, next to the Pooky lampshades. As ensembles go, these looks gesture towards a louder femininity than the Kate look of old – untethered from convention.

Could it be, perhaps, that fashion’s middle ground is no longer that middle? Maybe, like our politics, fashion is becoming polarised – the middle market crushed. At one end of the spectrum, you have the obvious luxury of Louis Vuitton, Sloane Street brands; at the other, the fast fashion of Zara and Topshop – now reputed to be making a Gen Z revival. Prestige-lite brands still exist – Boden, the White Company, Sarah K – but their ability to make the middle classes feel like they’re getting the good life for less without feeling somehow lesser has waned.

Boden in particular used to lead the pack on the strength of its brand pedigree, not simply its DNA. Owned by Old Etonian Johnny Boden, it tapped spectacularly into the national psyche – windy days on British beaches, drawing-room drinks parties – while providing upscale wardrobe basics (leopard-print ankle boots) and toned-down avant-garde trends (jazzy block-colour coats).

But then it went wrong, and the brand was forced to scale back its disastrous men’s offering and make a formal apology. Johnny Boden has attributed the losses to ‘forgetting’ his core customer, but the collective demise of similar brands points to the fact that fashion no longer meets its customers in the middle. In a world of Trump-ish opulence and Reform-style excess, we don’t just want to feel nice any more – we aspire to luxury. A nice Breton and a pair of skinny jeans just isn’t going to do it any more, even if it is made of organic cotton.

Kate Middleton, of course, doesn’t have to change at all. Her look, now held in a kind of sartorial aspic, is essential to the Firm’s ability to convince us of its middle-class credentials. Her influence will always be powerful, as it was when she first ‘broke the internet’ with her engagement Issa stretchy dress. As every brand specialist will tell you, no customer – and we are all consumers of Kate, let’s be clear – wants to be confused. In the meantime, I’m off to walk the dogs before school pick-up. Just a shame I can’t fit my barrel jeans into my Chameau wellies.