Duchess Kate got to get dressed up and attend a gala reception at Buckingham Palace last night. She and the Queen cohosted (?) an event for RADA honoring Helen Mirren. Unfortunately, the photo above is the only one we have, and you can’t even see Kate’s dress. But don’t worry. Kate repeated the red McQueen she wore in 2012 for the Queen’s Super-Royal Jubilee Boat Regatta Thing (I forget the real name of it, but you can see the old photos here). The Mail has the photos from last night here – Kate wore her hair down and she got to interact with Helen Mirren and other actors. Her skirt did not blow up although she did play with her security blanket hair a lot.

Speaking of her security blanket hair, Mclean’s (the Canadian weekly current affairs mag) ran an analysis piece last week about Kate and her hair and her styling issues. This was not some lovey-dovey propaganda piece either. It was an analysis of how Kate is becoming known more for her wardrobe malfunctions and her security-blanket hair rather than her work ethic or anything else. You can read the full piece here (Lainey at LaineyGossip is quoted), and here are some highlights:

Last June, on her last public outing before delivering a future king, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, visited a windy English shipyard. As the wind gusted and blew, she struggled to keep her short dalmatian-print coat dress from flying open, only to lose the battle at the most crucial moment—while christening the new cruise ship. “How many times can one duchess get her skirts blown up by the wind?” The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes grumbled. The incident was soon forgotten in the excitement over Prince George’s arrival, but the missteps picked up again soon enough—and so did the gibes.

After Kate’s short Orla Kiely skirt went skyward at London’s Docklands in November, London’s Daily Mail dubbed the duchess of Cambridge “weighty Katy,” suggesting she needed to weigh down the hems of her skirts to avoid more “Marilyn moments.” The Mirror seized on her “wardrobe malfunction” during a charity visit, while Radar Online bemoaned the “royal gust” that resulted in spectators and photographers alike getting an unexpected peak at those toned thighs (documented for posterity on a Pinterest board named Royal Gust of Wind).

In fact, during Kate’s 30 daytime public events in 2013, there were four unforced errors (13 per cent of the total), including a mid-thigh Moloh coat dress, whose back pleats went flying as she played table tennis with William at a Scottish community centre. For a royal, particularly one in her position, that’s a high faux pas rate. And that’s saying nothing of the fly-away tresses.

…Her most famous lapse occurred during the Cambridges’ inaugural tour to Canada in 2011. As she greeted a flower girl on the windswept tarmac of Calgary’s airport, the flowing skirt of her thin, yellow silk dress was blown high enough to raise alarms to Defcon 2, while her hair was a tangled mess. The next day, when she and William returned to the airport, she was awkwardly holding down the back of yet another full-skirted outfit. This was a novice duchess, of course, unused to tarmac weather patterns. But a year later, as if on Groundhog Day, she repeated the experience, exiting a plane in Brisbane, Australia.

One solution would be a slimmer skirt, such as the ones Kate wore during her visit to socially conservative Malaysia and Singapore. But Kate’s more typical look—she wears her skirts short and/or flowing, and her locks long and loose—was set in concrete a decade ago while dating William. “It’s the blue-eyeshadow syndrome,” says Joyce Gunhouse, co-owner and co-designer of Comrags, a Toronto-based clothing retailer, referring to the tendency to still wear in your 50s the style that looked great in your youth. “Each time, I’m more surprised,” says Susan Kelley of the popular What Kate Wore blog. “I’m sure that, someday, she’ll have to realize she can’t wear that silhouette.”

For Kate, the problem is partly geometry. She’s five foot nine and likes wearing towering heels. So when a little girl presents her with a floral bouquet, Kate is forced into an awkward quasi-squat-curtsey to avoid bending down at a revealingly steep angle. Wearing fitted trousers, popular with European young royals, doesn’t appear to be an option. Though Kate wears jeans to casual, sporty events, she’s never seen in dress pants; like all Windsor women, she “takes her cues from the boss,” states CNN royal contributor Victoria Arbiter, referring to the Queen, who doesn’t wear pants in public.

Royal guidelines extend to hairstyles, too. By pulling their hair back or up, and keeping it shoulder-length, most of Kate’s peers suffer few of the turmoils that afflict her own, much longer tresses. At formal evening events, her flowing style can overwhelm her face and hide her jewellery. As veteran royal blogger Ella Kay notes, “It would great to see her show off those pieces a bit more by sweeping her hair back.” She was roundly criticized on the Internet for twirling her long locks back into ringlets during a solemn Remembrance Sunday ceremony. “She seems like a bored, uninterested teenager,” said one blogger.

Elaine Lui, a reporter for CTV’s Etalk who has the popular Lainey Gossip website, sympathizes. “I have long, thick hair, too. When I’m on shoots, we have to retake five times because it’s flying all over the place.” Yet, like other royal watchers, Lui believes Kate won’t break her loose hair habit: It’s a security blanket she uses to get through the stress of public events. “There are times when it’s everywhere, and you want to brush it out of her face,” says CNN’s Arbiter. “You’d think it was driving her mad, yet she loves it.”

[From Maclean’s]

There’s more stuff in the article about how she needs to put weights in her skirts and the end of the article is basically like, “Well, she’s not in a hurry to fix these problems, so oh well.” My feeling is that Kate just does what she can get away with. You know what I mean? So far, the Queen hasn’t put her foot down about the exhibitionism or the constant hair-touching and too-young sausage curls. As soon as someone – like the Queen, or Charles, or Camilla or even William – says enough is enough and tells her to cut it out, she will. Incidentally, a famous British hairdresser just recently said (publicly) that Kate is in desperate need of a haircut and that she should take off a good six inches. Oh… that would be very interesting.

Photos courtesy of WENN.