Meghan Markle’s Neutral Cashmere Is ‘Power Casual’
In Netflix’s series on the Sussexes’ royal departure, Ms. Markle trades fascinators and pantyhose for homey cashmere sweaters and silks — an intentional contrast.
When Meghan Markle first rose to minor celebrity on the show “Suits,” she was wearing the buttoned-up wardrobe of a young lawyer: pencil skirts, strict button-ups and yes, suits. When she then reached unimaginable heights of global fame as Prince Harry‘s girlfriend and then wife, she dressed impeccably for the endless public appearances in coat dresses, high-heeled pumps and even fascinators. With her upright daughter-of-a-yoga-teacher posture and seemingly endless supply of camel wrap coats, she has, until recently, dressed for a relentlessly public life.
But in the six-part series “Harry & Meghan,” currently the number-two show on Netflix in the U.S., the duchess of Sussex presents a cozier, quieter, more intimate style. In the confessional-style portions of the series, Ms. Markle is a Nancy Meyers character come to life, wearing layers of haute-hygge knits, silks and discreet gold jewellery, with her hair styled in soft waves around her face. In the context of a docu-style show whose overriding theme is the desire for more privacy, these are private clothes that are nonetheless conveying a message to the public.
Ms Markle’s message appears to be: I am grounded, sincere, and down-to-earth, but refined. I have chickens, but I also have a gold Cartier watch.
“It’s power-casual,” said Meredith Melling, the co-founder and chief brand officer of La Ligne, a New York high-casual brand that has a big moment in the series. Representatives at Netflix and Archewell, the media company the Sussexes founded, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the teaser for one of the early episodes, Ms. Markle breaks down while wearing the $295 camel-and-red striped cashmere-and-wool Marin sweater from La Ligne over a pair of the brand’s $250 red cotton Bonne Nuit pyjamas. Behind her is a cream-and-cashmere Hermès Avalon blanket, which starts at $1,625 and went viral after its appearance on the show.
Ms Melling said there had been a sharp rise in interest in the La Ligne pieces worn by Ms. Markle. Historically, what Ms. Markle wears sells out, like the Everlane day tote she wore early in her courtship with Prince Harry.
The Marin sweater and Bonne Nuit pyjamas are the kind of cozy things that savvy, fashionable women wear at home when their old track sweatshirt won’t do. During the pandemic, Anna Wintour of Vogue made rare, intimate video missives from home while wearing La Ligne pieces, including the Marin sweater. Ms Melling mused, “There are these comfortable things that we became dependent on during the pandemic and we’re bringing them with us into 2022 and 2023.”
The La Ligne pieces are among the more recognisable of Ms. Markle’s clothing in the series. She also prominently wears a lavender cashmere-looking sweater over a matching slip skirt, which so far, avid Meghan style-watchers have yet to identify. (Several Instagram feeds and blogs are dedicated to identifying Ms. Markle’s clothing).
Years after wrapping “Suits,” Ms. Markle hasn’t totally given up on button-ups, although now they tend to be more unbuttoned. In one intimate moment of the series, while she’s drying her hair, she wears a navy button-up shirt from British designer Misha Nonoo, a friend who was one of the attendees at her baby shower. In another, she wears a cream blouse, open around the neck.
The blouses and the preponderance of cream colours are motifs Ms. Markle has honed since her 2021 Time cover that named her one of the world’s most influential people. On it, she wore an eggshell blouse (unbuttoned at the neck) tucked into a pair of matching pleated pants. It’s what Diane Keaton might wear if she suddenly decided to remove 10 accessories before leaving the house.
For the Time cover, stylist Nina Hallworth, who also works with stars like Jennifer Aniston and Kirsten Dunst, was credited with handling Ms. Markle’s wardrobe. Ms Hallworth and her sister Clare Hallworth have worked on other projects with Ms. Markle, and the stylists’ serene, luxe aesthetic is felt in the looks the duchess chose for the series.
In episode three, Ms. Markle confided her use of neutrals was a strategy honed in the early days of royal appearances. “Most of the time that I was in the U.K., I rarely wore colour. There was thought in that.” She continues, “To my understanding, you could never wear the same colour as Her Majesty if there’s a group event, but then you also shouldn’t be wearing the same colour as one of the other, more senior members of the family. So I was like, ‘Well, what’s a colour that they’ll probably never wear?’ Camel, beige, white. So I wore a lot of muted tones, but it was also so I could just blend in.”
Although this confession is juxtaposed with footage of Ms. Markle being fitted for a dramatic scarlet Carolina Herrera gown, her taste for creamy neutrals appears to have stuck. Or was never much of a stretch to begin with — even her pre-Harry Instagrams and lifestyle site the Tig show a woman who loved navy and neutrals. It’s only in one critical period, in the couple’s final royal visit back to the U.K., that Ms. Markle made a tactical point of using colour: “I never wanted to upstage or ruffle any feathers, so I just tried to blend in. But … I just felt like, “Well, let’s just look like a rainbow,” she says of her return, over Mick Jagger singing “she comes in colours everywhere.”
A photograph of the couple from that week — Ms. Markle beaming in a London downpour, wearing a Victoria Beckham sheath the colour of a cloudless California sky — is one of the most lasting images of their retreat.
In her more casual moments, Ms. Markle is never without her discreet, mostly symbolic, gold jewellery. In some scenes, she’s seen wearing her Sophie Lis “Love Pendant” necklace, which contains a design inspired by a line from the French poet Rosemonde Gérard: “Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.”
She also wears a gold Cartier Tank Française watch, identical to one worn by Princess Diana and often speculated to be an inheritance from her late mother-in-law, to whom comparisons abound in the show. Brynn Wallner, the founder of women’s watch platform Dimepiece, noted, “Whether or not it’s confirmed that this gold Cartier Tank Française actually belonged to Princess Diana, enough people associate it with her; so it therefore represents, symbolically, whatever the viewer projects onto it.” She added that “stacking” the watch against other gold bracelets was a faux pas in the watch world, because that could scratch it. If it’s an heirloom, she said, “it comes off a bit aloof.”
But Ms. Markle has loved Cartier watches for years. In 2015, she told Hello magazine that she bought herself a two-tone version of the Tank upon “Suits” being picked up for season two. She inscribed it “To M.M., From M.M.”
Nothing Meghan Markle wears is accidental, even behind closed doors. As Ms. Melling put it, it’s dressing with intention, and for a reason — “more people are probably watching this than are watching your average red carpet awards show.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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