“People are saying Meghan is mean for this,” reads a tweet on September 12, 2022. “Does anyone else think dressing up as your husband’s dead mom for a funeral is weird?” The post includes a photo montage of Markle and Diana wearing black coats and hats. Similar tweets garnered thousands of shares on Twitter within days of the Queen’s death on September 8, 2022. “I’m here for that level of pettiness,” says another tweet on September 12 with #QueenElizabeth. The side-by-side images were also released on Instagram and Facebook. But a reverse image search shows that the photo of Markle was taken during a Remembrance Day ceremony on November 11, 2019, as seen in the AFP photo below. The photo of Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997, was taken on Remembrance Day 1991, seen here. Jessica Storoschuk, a historian and author of a blog about the British royal family, told AFP that Diana and Markle were both seen wearing a poppy “to honor the veterans and those who did not return” from World War I . “In Britain, Canada and elsewhere, this will be immediately understood in the context of Remembrance Day,” he said. Brooke Newman, a historian of early modern Britain and the royal family at Virginia Commonwealth University, agreed. “Dressing in a simple black belted coat, adorned with a single red poppy, both women sought to shift the emphasis away from themselves and toward the central focus of the official occasion: the commemoration of the anniversary of the armistice 1918,” he said. Other royal women have been photographed in similar looks on other Remembrance Days. Below is an image of Princess Catherine wearing black with a red poppy in 2021. For Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which took place on Sept. 19, the women of the royal family wore “whatever was expected” of them, Storoschuk said: a black dress or coat of knee-length or longer, with a black hat and black tights . Markle appeared in black at several public ceremonies to bid farewell to the Queen. On September 10, King Charles III’s sons William and Harry also made a public appearance accompanied by their spouses to greet the crowds gathered in front of Windsor Castle. Harry and his wife have been under intense media scrutiny since early 2020, when they stepped down from their royal duties and moved to Los Angeles. The couple’s interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, as well as their lucrative deals with streaming platforms such as Spotify and AppleTV, increased attention. Newman said the posts circulating online play a role in the long-standing scrutiny of Markle’s fashion choices. “Royals, and women in particular, face intense media scrutiny and are therefore very careful with their clothing and jewelry choices,” she said. “As the only person of African descent to marry into the royal family, Meghan has faced an unprecedented level of negative criticism for her fashion choices — no matter how carefully she chooses her clothes.”… AFP
