What does your 2016 throwback look like? People have been posting pictures from the club, and their skinny jeans and millennial pink-forward outfits. Pop culture was swept up by Beyoncé’s Lemonade and La La Land. Creative directors like Alessandro Michele at Gucci, Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent, and Phoebe Philo at Celine ruled. Got whiplash? For Meghan Markle, it was an altogether different life too.
The Duchess of Sussex has joined in on the nostalgic social media trend by posting her own throwback to Instagram. In a carousel dropped yesterday (January 16), Meghan shared a black and white video from the present day, where we see her dancing in a field with her husband Prince Harry. The caption revealed that the clip was filmed by their four-year-old daughter, Princess Lilibet.
The second post in the carousel is an image of the couple in 2016, which looks like it was taken on their trip to Botswana that year, and which was also their third-ever date. The couple embrace, knee-deep in water and surrounded by grasslands.
“When 2026 feels just like 2016… you had to be there,” Meghan wrote.
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2016 was the year that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry actually met, set up on a blind date by mutual friends in early July. The couple went on to secretly date for about six months before their relationship became public. In an interview with Vanity Fair around the time of their engagement, Harry shared that he invited Meghan on this Botswana trip later that summer after they had been dating around London. “We camped out with each other under the stars,” he recalled. “She came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. So then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to know each other.” It was the trip that he knew he was his “soulmate.”
“I was astonished that she said, ‘Yes,’’ Harry said when thinking back on the date during the filming of their Harry Meghan docuseries. “This woman, that I’ve really met twice…she’s coming to Botswana, and we’re gonna be living in a tent for five days!”
The couple announced their engagement on November 27, 2017, and were married on May 19, 2018. They stepped away from their royal duties in 2020. A decade into their love story, a lot has changed, and it’s been even more heavily scrutinized.
Meghan ended 2025 with a holiday special edition of her Netflix series With Love, Meghan where she shared her favorite holiday traditions, seasonal crafts, and family recipes. That included a fig slice-adorned Christmas tree, making cacio e pepe gougères for restaurateur Will Guidara, and getting deep with tennis player Naomi Osaka. The royal couple also shared a holiday card, shown embracing young Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet among greenery.
And with 2025 being a year of more influencerdom and a significant style shift, don’t be surprised if you see Meghan’s life expanding into altogether new territories once more: maybe we’ll see her climbing the steps of the 2026 Met Gala in a custom Balenciaga gown in just a few short months.
