Prince Harry and Royal Meghan made their first appearance yesterday at Prince Charles’s Buckingham Palace tea party. She wore hosiery for the first time. Which made headlines all over the place. I’m obsessed with this conversation. I’m obsessed that we even have to have this conversation. Because it’s frustrating to me that the hosiery is a thing. That it’s considered a sign of respectability. That a woman, if she is to be at her most presentable, must cover her legs with a sheer layer of stretchy fabric. Because bare leg skin is …offensive? What calamity does bare leg skin portend?!? I’m not sure anyone can answer that question. It’s just the rules.
But these rules are not science. They were decided a long time ago by a certain class of people to establish a certain set of behaviours that would delineate between high and low. Somewhere along the line, someone slapped a word on it: “etiquette”. And that word is now often used as a weapon. If you have poor etiquette, if you don’t know which fork to use, or how to curtsy properly, or God forbid, cross one knee over the other instead of crossing at the ankles, and if you don’t wear hosiery to a f-cking garden party, it means you weren't raised in the right circumstances and therefore judged to be inferior.
OK, then. So Meghan is now a royal and therefore the opposite of inferior and to demonstrate her new superiority she’s now wearing hose. Of the wrong shade.
Hilariously, we now have a conspiracy theory that’s emerged about Meghan’s hose shade. Duana and I got an email this morning from a reader/listener called Carole who posits that Meghan deliberately chose the wrong shade of hose to show that she was in fact wearing hose:
Maybe Meghan specifically wore overly-light-colored, obvious pantyhose on her first day of public Duchess-dom to "show her work" - to show she was with the program, and understood the dress code at her new Firm?
I'm an attorney, and like clockwork, our summer legal interns would wear suits to the office on their first day of work. We'd email interns the dress code in advance- "business casual" unless they were in trial - but, like clockwork, they'd wear a suit anyway, to show how prepared they were.
I love the idea that Meghan showed up over-prepared for the first day of her new job - fits with the very well-thought-out wedding!
And this prompted Duana to add her own layer of conspiracy to Carole’s theory:
If she intentionally wore the 'wrong' colour nylons then later on, when it seems suspiciously like she's not wearing any, she can be all "Oh no I am, I just finally found the right colour for my skin!"
BUT ACTUALLY NOT WEAR THEM
Well this I can get behind. I can totally get behind Royal Meghan setting up a long con here as a way to subvert the status quo – which is what we saw her do on Saturday at the wedding, producing a black wedding in their noble house. Revolution as reform? Rebuilding from the inside out?
