Does Duchess Meghans brown-heavy wardrobe project quiet luxury or sad beige?

I was going to link to this in another story, but I decided to devote a post to it because I actually find it sort of interesting, and people love to analyze the Duchess of Sussex’s fashion choices. While Meghan is not a full-on Taylor Swift-esque dresser, i.e. leaving a trail of breadcrumbs and easter eggs with how she dresses and what she chooses, Meghan does dress with purpose and you can tell that she loves fashion. She’s making deliberate choices and sending certain messages with her style. So, last week, the Sussexes appeared in a video announcing the winners of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund. In the video, Harry and Meghan coordinated in browns. Meghan’s look was a t-neck sleeveless top and skirt by Bleusalt, a sustainable label out of Malibu. The Telegraph had a whole-ass style-section piece about whether Meghan’s love of brown was about “quiet luxury” or simply part of the “Sad Beige” trend.

Looking remarkably polished and glowing, Meghan was dressed in a £145 sleeveless turtleneck top and £165 tube skirt by Malibu-based label Bleusalt, which manufactures its designs sustainably in the US – a choice made with their American audience in mind, no doubt. She finished her look with a pair of Lanvin earrings. Meanwhile, Harry’s trousers were a similar shade of beige and teamed with a white shirt with Barack Obama-esque rolled-up sleeves. Beige has always been a signature colour for Meghan and there are competing explanations as to why she loves it so much.

You may have assumed that Meghan would use the freedom of her new life in California to experiment with colour, but she has remained faithful to the sludgy coffee shades which have come to epitomise the “quiet luxury” trend of recent years. It’s a look fuelled by the stealth-wealth style crystallised in TV shows like Succession and in the courtroom by Gwyneth Paltrow during her ski incident trial earlier this year. Where beige was once a tool for Meghan to blend in, it’s now a hallmark of her alignment with the 0.01 per cent – beige speaks of private jets, dry cleaners and generally never having to do anything that could risk a smudge or a stain.

Dressing in the tones of your favourite Starbucks order became so ubiquitous earlier this year that there has been a backlash against the look. In some quarters, it is now called “sad beige”, a term that originated from the trend among wealthy parents more interested in aesthetics than enjoyment to dress their children in neutral, minimalist colours rather than the cheerful brights usually associated with fun and childhood. There’s also the fact that the look is so easy to copy that you can now source it as easily at Brunello Cucinelli, where a beige coat costs £5,400, as Boohoo (now selling a beige off-shoulder top for £13.65).

Whether you are team “quiet luxury” or team “sad beige”, there’s no denying Harry and Meghan’s commitment to the look. It’s a way of visually joining a tribe of A-listers for whom sad beige life is sacrosanct, like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, founders of The Row (a label where you can buy a skirt like the one Meghan wears in this video for £1,380). Indeed, when the Duke and Duchess appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2021, they enlisted Aniston’s stylist Nina Hallworth to dress them (they went for black and white, not beige, on that occasion).

[From The Telegraph]

The Telegraph also quotes Meghan herself, from the Netflix docuseries, where she explained why she wore so many neutrals while she was in the UK, describing how she was trying not to stand out. While that is very likely true, I think it’s also true that during her years in the UK, Meghan wore a lot of pieces which were already in her closet (her pre-royal closet). Meaning, she already had a neutral-heavy style with lots of creams, whites, blacks and browns. I think her post-royal appearances have backed that up too – while she pops up with a bold color here and there (as she did in the UK), her baseline aesthetic is California White and the Sad Beiges (a terrific band name, if you ask me). Now, it’s a matter of opinion for the viewer as to what Meghan is actually projecting here: quiet luxury or that dull, sad, Kardashian-esque beige-heavy color palette? Well, Meghan and Harry do look rich, but to be clear – I was also sort of disappointed to see her in another sad beige outfit. She looks so good in green! And red, and blue and purple.

Photos courtesy of Vimeo, WENN, Backgrid, Avalon Red.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pLHLnpmirJOdxm%2BvzqZmcWppaIB6e8OonKyXlKqwqbHSrJamnZedrq%2B%2FvpupqK%2BeYrWmrdWylrCZopm%2FsK7EmKerp5qasLWr0K6gnqyPocK5wdGylqiqj6iupavBnqCgnV8%3D