Here's the article. It's behind a paywall so have copied and pasted
and you think Mumsnet is bitchy... saucer of milk for the journalist
^It’s not much fun being seven months pregnant in the dead of winter, not least when you already have a four-year-old and a two-year-old. All you want to do is curl up in front of the telly in a tracksuit. Instead, if you’re the Duchess of Cambridge, you have to fly to freezing Stockholm, then Oslo, to endure endless versions of Ikea canteen meatballs on the best Oftast crockery while making polite conversation with your husband’s Scandinavian 45th cousins twice removed.
While Prince William only had to don a bow tie and make jokes about Abba, the poor duchess had to put up with her outfits for this tour of duty of Sweden and Norway being judged by the world.
First up was the ruffled floral mustard gown, like a full-length Cadbury’s Roses wrapper, worn for dinner with the Swedish prime minister.
The diplomatic verdict was “eye-catching”; keyboard warriors wondered if the duchess’s suitcase had been mislaid and someone in the embassy had kindly offered to run her up an emergency frock from old curtains, à la Maria in The Sound of Music.
Initially, I wondered if Kate, 36, had decided patriotically to model what looked like a cert from Marks & Spencer’s Per Una range — whose every garment must by law combine frills, busy prints, garish colours and bizarre cuts — only to discover the dress was by royal favourite Erdem Moralioglu and cost £1,945.
It’s possible the Canadian-born, Britain-based Erdem was offering bulk-buy discounts, because the following evening she was displaying his wares again — this time a long devoré blue frill-hemmed dress that unkind wags suggested had been salvaged from the DFS sofa sale before having a £2,690 price tag put on it.
The duchess’s daywear was only marginally less attention-grabbing. She met schoolchildren in a red and white houndstooth Catherine Walker coat that not only drew unkind comparisons to a picnic blanket but also provoked accusations of Kate trying to steal the style of her husband’s late mother, who, royal-watchers proclaimed, had worn a similar-style Moschino jacket to Princess Eugenie’s christening in 1990. What were the odds?
Perhaps cowed, the duchess hastily retreated to her habitual inoffensive monochrome frocks and coats for daytime. She was back in a voluminous pink Alexander McQueen gown for dinner with Norway’s royals, however, this time channelling not so much Princess Diana as Princess Elsa from Frozen, as dragged from the bottom of the Disney Store bargain bin. It seemed pregnancy hormones had duped her, like many of us, me included, into swallowing the dictum of the high priestess of eccentric librarian chic, Miuccia Prada: “Ugly is attractive; ugly is exciting.”
More probably she’d been egged on by her long-term stylist, Natasha Archer, who, according to Vanity Fair, “has persuaded Kate to take risks”, convincing her that beneath her home counties exterior was concealed the avant-garde spirit of a 19-year-old Latvian design student.
Archer has been with the duchess throughout her Scandi tour, as has her hairdresser, Amanda Cook Tucker, who created a stir by posting her less-private-than-she-believed Instagram shot (rapidly deleted) of the equipment she was packing for the five-day trip: 13 brushes, six combs, three sets of hair tongs, two hairdryers and seven hair products — none, obviously, intended for William.
That provoked a predictable brouhaha about the profligacy of employing someone to coiff endless updos with their style nods to Princess Anne in 1978. This was rivalled only by equally vociferous complaining on bickerfests such as Mumsnet that “Kate Middleton needs to hire a make-up artist”. “Her heavy eyeliner hides her eyes and the blusher is terrible,” one outraged poster complained. “It’s a diaganol [sic] across her face.”
Poor Kate. As with any woman in the public eye, she will never win. Spendthrift or tightwad, glossy or grunge, both she and Wills, with his dad jeans and passion for Radio 1, will eternally be blasted for frumpiness.
Still, I suspect, neither could give a fig, having long conceived a master plan for Kate to be embraced by “the Firm” by moulding herself into the anti-Diana Duchess of Bland, patron saint of nude tights, matching LK Bennett court shoes and robotic repetitions of “Have you come far?”.
It may even be that this new, upholstered edginess represents a defiant gearchange. After all, with her future sister-in-law, Meghan Markle, entering the spotlight, replete with an American passport, indiscreet relatives, an ex-husband and waffle about feminism, the heat is off. Kate’s no longer the newbie. She’s produced an heir and (nearly) two spares. She’ll be queen one day and if she wants to wear a sofa to dine with the House of Oldenburg, no one can damn well stop her.^