We’ve just about had enough of the creative director musical chairs happening in the fashion industry—but now Kate Middleton is entering her designer era.
Yesterday afternoon, the Prince and Princess of Wales were dispatched to Stirling, Scotland, beginning with a visit to the National Curling Academy to meet Team Great Britain ahead of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan, and ending with a pint of beer (when in Rome, etc) at The Gothenburg pub in the former mining village of Fallin. The highlight of the engagement, though—at least for readers of this magazine—will have been the royal couple’s stop at Radical Weavers, a volunteer-run textile studio founded in 2019 with the aim of building social cohesion through traditional tartan-weaving workshops, with finished pieces donated to food banks, as well as homeless and refugee shelters.
The Waleses—who, as one volunteer joked, already have more than enough tartans to their name—were invited to create a new pattern on a traditional loom, with William immediately reaching for yarns of blue, teal, red, green, and hot pink. “It’s going to be interesting to see how they all mix,” he said, to which Catherine politely demurred: “That’s quite punchy.” Take heed: the Princess has form here, after all, having arrived in Scotland wearing a longline, double-breasted Chris Kerr coat—styled with Gianvito Rossi boots and a Le Kilt skirt—made from a Johnstons of Elgin wool in a Caledonian-inspired palette of navy and ice-blue plaid that she helped design. It is perhaps the first time she has publicly been credited as a collaborator, and of course, was totally in-step with the Kate Middleton school of style.
While Catherine is known for taking a hands-on approach to curating her wardrobe—often working closely with a handful of trusted designers on bespoke pieces intended for repeat wear, such as her many (many) custom Catherine Walker coat dresses—that level of involvement appears only to have grown since her personal assistant-turned-stylist, Natasha Archer, was reported to have stepped down in 2025. Long an ambassador for the ‘made in Britain’ sentiment, it is not beyond imagining that Kate might follow the Duchy Originals model—established by King Charles to champion sustainable, organic British farming—and apply it instead to clothes.