On June 4—the day of her daughter Lilibet’s fourth birthday—Meghan Markle posted three different Instagrams. Yes, three. The first was a slideshow that included two heavily filtered black and white photographs of the Duchess holding her daughter. One seemed to have been taken fairly recently; the other just after she was born. The second was a slideshow of a sepia-toned photo of Prince Harry with Lilibet as an infant, followed by video of Harry and a toddler Lilibet walking in Montecito. And the third?
Well, that’s going to take a new paragraph.
It’s a video. Taken in a hospital room. For the first few seconds Meghan, heavily pregnant, stands awkwardly looking at a camera. Then music begins to play: Starrkeisha’s “The Baby Momma Dance.” She begins to move to the music, at one point, dropping it low. Prince Harry eventually comes into frame, waving his arms. “Four years ago today, this also happened. Both of our children were a week past their due dates… so when spicy food, all that walking, and acupuncture didn’t work—there was only one thing left to do!” Meghan captioned the video.
If you visit certain corners of the internet or read certain papers, you’ll find yourself amongst a populus convinced that Meghan Markle is some sort of manipulative, narcissistic mastermind. (“She wanted to be the victim because then she could convince Harry that it was an unbearable experience and they had no choice but to move to America,” an anonymous source told The Times of London. “She marches around like a dictator in high heels, fuming and barking orders. I’ve watched her reduce grown men to tears,” another anonymous source told The Hollywood Reporter.)
I’m not a psychiatrist. So I’ll refrain from weighing on what personality traits Markle does, or does not, have. Nor have I ever met Meghan. So I’ll also refrain from commenting on what she is, or is not, like.
But I won’t refrain from this: Markle’s Instagram presence makes her seem so... harmlessly millennial.
Everything has a filter. (She loves a black-and-white photo). Captions contain the crying laughing emoji. (Gen Z prefers the skull.) She posts mood boards with cheesy sayings that seem plucked from Pinterest: “You cannot make everybody happy. You are not a jar of Nutella,” or “I love you with all my butt. I would say heart, but my butt is bigger.” There are also video slideshows and random photos with text overlaid. (“My husband’s hat gets a twirl,” reads a red caption over a photo of Prince Harry’s cowboy hat from Kemo Sabe.)
Before Meghan Markle joined the royal family, she had her own Instagram. She posted overly-saturated travel photos with her back to the camera, yoga poses, peonies, and inspirational quotes in millennial pink like “find what you love, love what you find.” Nearly everything was followed by a hashtag.
By the way, so did everyone else: in the mid 2010s, it was common to pose in front of dramatic backgrounds before slapping the Clarendon filter over it, and to share things that today wouldn’t warrant a post at all. (Back then, we didn’t have stories or slideshow features—and it showed.) The aesthetic Meghan had was the defining one of the social media platform.
But then in 2018, she logged off.
It took her seven years—and a dramatic move from the United Kingdom—to log back on: this time, under the username of @meghan. But while the rest had moved onto a candid, darker-toned, photo dump style of posting, Meghan went right back to the highly saturated filtered-ness.
Her haters might call her presence cringey. Her stans might call it endearing. But no matter where you fall on that Markle spectrum, you can’t deny its disarming. It’s hard to have strong, angry feelings about a woman who posts cheesy quotes about Nutella, awkwardly dances in a hospital room, or posts captions about her children that says “love you more than all the stars in all the sky, all the raindrops, and all the salt on all the french fries in all the world.” (Side note: What?)
And while I don’t think that Meghan’s Instagram is putting her in the top echelons of envy-inducing lifestyle influencers, I do think it could actually be a net positive. In the United Kingdom, her popularity is at an all-time low, according to YouGov. In the United States, it hovers around 39%. By posting like, well, a slightly un-hip mom, it actually makes her seem… a slightly un-hip mom. And guess what slightly un-hip moms are? Likable.
How many of us have effortlessly cool Instagrams anyway?
