The Duchess of Sustainability, Cottagecore and Damage Control: Kate Middleton Wins Wimbledon by a Complete Fashion Set
LONDON — Sustainability and cottagecore are on the Duchess of Cambridge’s style radar.
To the Wimbledon tennis championship’s women’s finals face-off between Ons Jabeur and Elena Rybakina, Kate Middleton rewore a canary yellow midi dress from London-based Serbian fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić.
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Middleton previously wore the sunny dress with the knot-detailed shoulder on her tour of the Caribbean with her husband, Prince William.
This is the second time the duchess has reworn a piece from her Jamaica tour-robe. The couple’s controversial royal tour was not met with positive reactions in March, but in rewearing items from the tour, Middleton is doing damage control.
She’s moving on the narrative by starting a conversation around sustainability. In the long run the origin of where the dress was first worn will lose its meaning, as it will have shifted to her green credentials
She’s not blind to the power of fashion — especially for a British royal where the term “Kate effect” has been coined, she chooses her sartorial outings carefully and considerably.
Sunshine yellow is a royal favorite among Queen Elizabeth II and the duchess. On her first royal tour in 2011 to Calgary, Canada, Middleton had a Marilyn Monroe moment in her yellow Jenny Packham tea dress.
During a tour of Australia in 2014, she wore another Roksanda number in the yolky shade that caused Middleton to jokingly tell a crowd member, “William said I look like a banana.”
Yellow was on the agenda at the four-day Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June. The duchess selected a custom daffodil yellow dress by the British designer Emilia Wickstead to wear to St. Paul’s Cathedral with a matching Philip Treacy hat.
It’s no coincidence that Middleton has always chosen the shade to commemorate big anniversaries, such as the Queen’s seven decades on the throne and 100 years of Wimbledon’s center court.
Bringing cottagecore to the matches, she also on Saturday debuted a new LK Bennett saffron straw hat with a black ribbon subtly playing to the lockdown trend that took over social media and the runways of Jacquemus, Collina Strada, Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton and Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior.
As a patron of the All England Tennis Club, the Duchess of Cambridge’s yellow dress could have been a slight hint of who she’s supporting in the men’s finals by wearing a designer of Novak Djokovic’s native country.
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