Kate Middleton throwback photo reveals wild transformation
She’s one of the most famous women in the world but in 2005 she was wearing low-slung jeans and over-plucking her eyebrows like the rest of us.
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Kate, Meghan, Diana: They are mononyms, women for whom we do not need their actual titles or descriptions or identifying details to know exactly who they are.
Rewind further and there was Charlotte, Caroline, Alexandra, and Mary.
For hundreds of years, the lifeblood of the British monarchy has been women agreeing to cede their autonomy, identity and freedom for the good of the institution.
This week a bit of ancient royal history popped up over on X, formerly known as Twitter, raising the question, are princesses (and duchesses) born or made?
Specifically, it’s a photo that if you showed anyone under the age of about 20, I wonder if they could even be able to name which extraordinarily famous woman it shows, albeit in a much, much younger guise.
The image was taken in April, 2005 and shows the woman now known as Kate, the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Catherine and high street icon destined to be commemorated in bronze statuary outside Zara branches the world over.
Even with the full, awesome power of AI, it is impossible to conjure an image that stands in greater contrast to who Kate is now: Makeup-up free, in footpath-dragging bootleg jeans, wearing an impossibly daggy anorak and eating the dregs of a burger or sandwich. (My CSI-worth attempts at zooming in were all for naught sadly.)
It is a painful exercise in cognitive dissonance to try and equate that girl circa 2005 with the Kate we know today.
And therein lies a fundamental truth: That, of the women who marry into the royal family, none turn up on day one outside the Buckingham Palace gates for eager admittance with any idea in the least how to do the job.
Princesses, by and large, are not born but made.
(Does that make them the lab-grown meat of the carnivorous royal world?)
None of them are much good straight out the gate.
Every royal bride during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II followed nearly exactly the same trajectory: They would be outed as a prince’s girlfriend by the press, triggering a media and public frenzy. Said frenzy would only grow until an engagement was announced, followed by a new level of ecstatic press coverage of the gel in question, with the wedding the ecstatic acme, all of which would be followed by several months of giddy coverage of the newlyweds.
And then, in every case and this absolutely includes Diana, Princess of Wales, has come The Great Dip. The excitement of a royal hitching would give way to the actual meat and potatoes of 9-5 royalling and with that has always, always come a backlash. Enchantment gives way to a certain cool disillusionment.
Really, for these women, having been raised so high, how could they go anywhere but down?
All of these women, even aristocratic Diana, struggled in their new job – a job that came with no handbook and no on the job training. If there was an unofficial credo it would be buy a hat, learn to wave, try not to f**k it up too badly. Cheerio then!
Like a 17th century witch trial, the Palace’s approach has perennially translated to a sink-or-swim brutality.
Fault-finding suddenly becomes the name of the game.
One particularly heinous example: When in 2012 Kate was photographed sunbathing topless while on holiday in France with William, there was plenty of finger-wagging in her direction and blame apportioned to her. Her fault, you see, for taking her bikini off.
It is so easy to forget all this now when 2023 Kate is adored by the British public (if not much of the world) and could probably get away with mowing down her kids’ school’s lollipop man these days in her Audi station wagon. (I can see the headlines – ‘Kate praised for putting lollipop man out of misery’; ‘Kate makes £20 style statement as inconsiderate man gets caught under wheels’.)
But rewind to the early 2010s, back in those early years as the Duchess of Cambridge, the Art History graduate often flubbed it. She was routinely accused of doing too little official work, taking too many holidays, being too quiet and too hesitant and spending too much time sequestered away in Anglesey in Wales where she and William then lived doing god knows what all day. (Writing Charmed fan-fiction? Crocheting teapot covers for the elderly? Secretly working on her own feminist translation of the Iliad?)
Too, too, too: Royal women are always ‘too’ something. Too hot, too cold; too fat, too thin; too loud, too quiet. They are never, ever enough as they are.
This month it will be nearly 13 years since St James’s Palace announced on November 16, 2010 that William had finally gotten down on bended knee. It has taken every one of those 4,700 plus days for Kate to get where she is now: Consistently hailed as the best thing to happen to the House of Windsor since they twigged about that haemophilia thing.
What I will perennially wonder is why this was not all explained to the woman formerly known as Meghan Markle exactly this time in November 2017, the month that her engagement to Prince Harry was revealed. That it was never going to be easy. It was never going to be a fairytale or wondrous or simple. The adulation would die down, to be replaced by opening bridges and visiting Yorkshire
When it comes to princesses or duchesses, how can anyone do a perfect job from the word ‘go’ when it’s a gig that no one can truly ever be properly prepared for? Where there is no apprenticeship? Where each new recruit is existing at the epicentre of a firestorm of attention and obsession and Union Jack-bleeding hysteria?
For Meghan, for Kate, for Diana, it must have been an incredibly hard transition, one made even more rough by the fact they were coming off the sugar rush of a royal wedding and having had their faces slapped all over commemorative tins of shortbread and the occasional stamp.
What this brilliant 2005 image should remind us is that it takes years to be any good at the bloody job; to fit the mould; to truly know your part and to be able to give a flawless performance.
Let me ask you this: When was the last time you even saw Kate eat in public? (And not just politely tasting things during official engagements.) Thus let us all now doff our caps and pay our respects to that sandwich/hamburger from that 2005 photo: It was the last (normal) supper.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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