I’m glad the British media is trying to get back to regularly-scheduled programming when it comes to the Princess of Wales. Back in the day, they would run a dozen “fashion/style” stories for every one appearance by Kate. It’s the royalist-media equivalent of trying to make fetch happen, only they kind of stopped for the better part of a year. There’s been precious little analysis of Kate’s “comeback style” and I’m still waiting for someone to talk about how weird it is that Kate has been wearing turtlenecks constantly this year. Well, the Daily Mail gave us two funny style stories this week. One is about how Princess Kate is obviously copying Queen Elizabeth II by… wearing one color at a time. “She wore a green coat, she’s just like the queen!” Basically. But nothing beats this story, about Kate’s big style hack: shoulder pads.
She’s back, and she means business. After months away from the spotlight, the Princess of Wales has made her triumphant return to public life with a striking new look, and one thing is clear – she has embraced the power of the shoulder pad.
From her first reappearance in Southport last October to her recent engagement at the St Patrick’s Day parade, the future Queen has ditched her flowing midi dresses in favour of a sharper, more structured silhouette.
The message is unmistakable – Kate is stronger than ever – and her wardrobe is the proof. In place of floaty skirts and delicate detailing, we are seeing a new, more commanding princess. With every appearance, she steps out in expertly tailored blazers, impeccably cut coats, and structured dresses, all featuring one common element – shoulder pads.
Adding structure without overwhelming her frame, Kate’s power dressing has become more pronounced with defined shoulders creating an unmistakable nod to authority as she stands tall and exudes confidence and control.
Kate’s new penchant for power dressing is no accident. In times of transition, a change in wardrobe can be a deliberate and powerful statement. The strong silhouette created by shoulder pads conveys a sense of authority, stability and resilience – qualities essential for the Princess of Wales’ increasingly prominent royal role. After all, history has shown us time and time again that women in power turn to sharp tailoring as their sartorial weapon of choice.
Just my opinion, but Kate doesn’t really need shoulder pads, she has strong-looking shoulders without the pads. And I think her not-so-secret style hack is that most of her coats and blazers already come with built-in shoulder pads anyway, although Kate could obviously “bespoke” the sh-t out of her coats to remove the pads. Something else I’ve noticed – which apparently the Mail has not noticed – is that Kate looks like she’s been experimenting with corsets or some kind of heavy-duty shapewear so that her waist looks especially “snatched.” You can see it especially in the St. Patrick’s Day photos. It’s not just the shoulder pads – she’s been trying to give herself a more pronounced “V” shape.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.
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- The Prince and Princess of Wales attend the annual Commonwealth Day Service of Celebration at Westminster Abbey, in London. Picture date: Monday March 10, 2025.,Image: 974325989, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Aaron Chown/Avalon
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- The Prince and Princess of Wales attend the annual Commonwealth Day Service of Celebration at Westminster Abbey, in London. Picture date: Monday March 10, 2025.,Image: 974326081, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Aaron Chown/Avalon
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- Westminster, London, UK. 10th March 2025. Her Royal Highness, Catherine, The Princess Royal of Wales, attends a service for Commonwealth Day at Westminster Abbey.,Image: 974326325, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: Supplied by AVALON – Fee Payable Upon Reproduction – For queries contact Avalon – sales@avalon.red London: +44 (0) 20 7421 6000 Los Angeles: +1 (310) 822 0419 Madrid: +34 91 533 4289, Model Release: no, Credit line: Photo by Amanda Rose/Avalon
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- The Princess of Wales, Colonel, Irish Guards, visiting the regiment at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Wellington Barracks. PIC: HRH The Princess of Wales joins Guardsmen and families in the Junior Ranks dining Hall.,Image: 976628565, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Eddie Mulholland/Avalon
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- The Princess of Wales, Colonel, Irish Guards, visiting the regiment at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Wellington Barracks. PIC: HRH The Princess of Wales joins Guardsmen and families in the Junior Ranks dining Hall.,Image: 976628569, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Eddie Mulholland/Avalon
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- The Princess of Wales, Colonel, Irish Guards, visiting the regiment at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Wellington Barracks. PIC: HRH The Princess of Wales meets ‘Mini Micks’ junior cadets from Northern Ireland.,Image: 976628601, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Eddie Mulholland/Avalon
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- The Princess of Wales, Colonel, Irish Guards, visiting the regiment at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Wellington Barracks. PIC: HRH The Princess of Wales with Major General Sir Chris Ghika Regimental Lieutenant Colonel.,Image: 976628635, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Eddie Mulholland/Avalon
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- London, UNITED KINGDOM – Catherine, Princess of Wales during the 2025 Irish Guards’ St. Patrick’s Day Parade at Wellington Barracks in London. Pictured: Catherine, Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton BACKGRID USA 17 MARCH 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: Zak Hussein / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- London, UNITED KINGDOM – Catherine, Princess of Wales during the 2025 Irish Guards’ St. Patrick’s Day Parade at Wellington Barracks in London. Pictured: Catherine, Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton BACKGRID USA 17 MARCH 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: Zak Hussein / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- London, UNITED KINGDOM – Catherine, Princess of Wales during the 2025 Irish Guards’ St. Patrick’s Day Parade at Wellington Barracks in London. Pictured: Catherine, Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton BACKGRID USA 17 MARCH 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: Zak Hussein / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- The Princess of Wales during a visit to the Irish Guards for their St Patrick’s Day Parade at Wellington Barracks in London Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 17 Mar 2025 Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales during the 2025 Irish Guards’ St. Patrick’s Day Parade at Wellington Barracks in London Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 17 Mar 2025 Credit: Cover Images
She looks like she left the hanger inside her coat and wore it anyway.. reminds me of Carol Burnet playing Katie Scarlett O’Hara wearing the drapes with the rod still in place. Hilarious skit.
So true! LOL
My first thought! Particularly with this year’s green outfit & that stupid little hat.
LOL thank you, I was trying to remember what her intense shoulder pads reminded me of.
Shoulder pads need to stay in the 1980s.
Joan Crawford liked big shoulder pads too!
Now she can claim her shoulders are much larger because of shoulder pads !! K has always had a very masculine inverted triangle shape, tiny hips, no defined waist and much larger shoulders. It appears that there is now padding added to the hips to give the illusion of curves.
Something is so amiss here—a woman who’s suffered through chemotherapy for perhaps a year, rather than being kind to her body wears a corset? What on earth is she trying to prove? SMH.
It’s so strange. Plus we know she doesn’t have an hourglass figure like that, because she’s been photographed for decades. And it’s fine, I don’t think her shape has every been criticised much. So why can’t she, at 43, be okay with what she looks like? Is it body dysmorphia or what??
I think Kaiser is wrong (sorry, Kaiser), I don’t think it’s a corset – she literally has nothing to corset. I think it’s padding in the hips.
She is SO THIN right now, I think the shoulder pads and other padding are meant to give the illusion of a healthier body shape.
I do wonder if mentioning the shoulder pads is the DM dipping their toe into working towards that.
Respectfully, I completely agree with you, Shazbot. Many of these coat [dresses] are repeats, and it seems as though the shoulder pads are more emphasised now because K’s shoulders don’t fit them the same way as in the past.
I also ‘respectfully’ agree. I thought the same about adding padding the hip area of her coat. I’ve avoided saying anything, yet her thinness does seem more pronounced to my eyes. I wish (almost) everyone wellness.
I think she’s been padding for a while. There was a photo of her in a beige dress where it looked like she had a butt, which she never did. So I think she’s has been padding butt and boobs for a while. Even before the illness last year.
I respectfully agree with everyone here in the comments. I don’t think she’s using a corset because that portion of her body has always been extremely small and doesn’t need cinching, but I do believe she is padding in her hip and butt area to give the illusion of an hourglass shape. If I recall correctly, she did the same thing to her wedding dress by using padding to create the illusion of an hourglass shape. I think she’s been doing it for a while but because she’s so thin and using these couch cushions for shoulder pads it stands out more than usual.
Maybe she borrowed Pippa’s wedding butt
So power dressing must include big shoulder pads? I thought they were not going to comment on what she wears just what she does but I guess they have figured it out that her wearing outfits is what she does along with showing up to show the outfit off with the photo ops..
I don’t think she’s snatching her waist, I think she’s letting out her clothing below the “waist” of whatever she’s wearing.
Anyone on here have a long torso and have tried corsets or shape wear?
Letting her clothes out and adding padding to create the illusion of a short waist (like Meghan) at the second-to-last button on the red coat. Her natural waist is at the last button. Corseting her rib cage would not give her a ‘snatched waist’.
And she has always had very narrow hips, which she liked to show off in jeggings when she was younger (or hang naked out the window at the boys at school — hence ‘Kate Middlebum’). Using coat dresses and padding is a clever old Hollywood trick.
Or Dior new look, as @Belinda provides from a seamstresses’s perspective below
I don’t think it’s snatched waist, more like flared hips. Her waist is already narrow enough, and so are her hips so I think she is adding something at the hip area.
And yeah her upper body is already upside down triangle shaped, so she doesn’t need the big pads.
From the pictures above, her posture looks so much better in the green coat dress than the red one. So maybe it helps with that? Although William wasn’t with her when she wore the green so maybe that’s the difference.
The shoulder pads are not a new thing. She started that when she began wearing suits on a regular basis. The shapewear/corset seems new to me. She was definitely wearing one on St. Patrick’s Day.
Giant shoulder pads are all over the runways, so this isn’t particularly cutting edge. But with her height and the very high heels she wears, she’s pretty much 6 feet tall, so she can carry off a wider shoulder.
I don’t know about all the rest – Kate being in power and a symbol of authority, stability and resilience. But I suppose with William being a weak, tantrum-throwing toddler, somebody has to look stable in that family, even if it’s just by wearing shoulder pads.
Kate is dependent on William’s whims. She has no authority, stability or resilience. I think Carole got to the media about how Kate “deals with” William. Kate does not look “stable” especially after the way she was caught on camera treating Meghan badly.
Tessa I love how you keep in the fore front Kate’s unconsciousable behavior towards Meghan when she physically bullied Meghan lest we forget
I mean, stable to the British audience. We can keep bringing up Kate’s behavior toward Meghan, but I doubt the general British audience remembers it, if they ever recognized it in the first place – the tabloids have done a good job of erasing it.
With Charles considered all but buried, nobody giving a rat’s ass about Camilla and consistent articles about William’s laziness and tantrums, who do they have left? It’s Kate the resilient one, the one who keeps the family together, the one who keeps William from going off the rails, the one who wears shoulder pads. At least, that’s the story for now.
These are kinda weird shoulder pads, though. They extend up instead of out.
Power dressing? Kate?! Oh please, she rarely works
Power dressing for the school run and the vacay!
Kate’s secret weapon is…..shoulder pads? How can these people stand to write such drivel?
I think she wears them because they help to hide how thin she is.
And yes, something looks different in the St Patrick photos compared to the Commonwealth photos in the red bow coatdress. Maybe something bulkier underneath?
I don’t think it’s a corset, but as I mentioned above, she has been padding her butt on some occasions. There is a beige jersey dress from I think 2023 where she suddenly developed a butt that she never had before.
To me it looks like she’s trying to appear less svelte, less slim. She’s probably trying to avoid speculation on her health state.
Kate is built like a linebacker and doesn’t need shoulder pads.
A linebacker? Hardly. She’s built like a pipe cleaner. She appears to be trying to create curves where there are no curves because she’s dieted herself down to impossible skinniness.
Not sure it’s a corset. Could be just a lot of extra fabric around her hips because she’s lost even more weight. But she or her dressers roll with it because they’re trying to hide her extreme thinness. There are also multiple darts on the St. Patrick’s coat, going from the waistband to her pockets/hips, and the darts add volume when they taper off (as they’re meant to for normal hips), but even these darts aren’t enough to make the fabric lie flat at her waist and hips.
I don’t think it’s a corset, just a well tailored coat. It’s shocking how much nicer my figure looks in an expensive dress as opposed to something I bought from Target. Easily ten pounds thinner. Granted, I have a curvier shape because I like food. I think you can well made clothing anywhere, but the tailoring that goes into an expensive piece is night and day.
KKKhate: Oh look at me. I’m an empty headed, lazy mean girl and The Royal Racist…but hey, my waist is SNATCHED!!!
This is the silliest article I’ve ever seen! Give writer kudos for developing so many words about Kate and shoulder pads, though.
The green coat is designed to feature the waist. It has a slight A-line shape.
She looks like she’s in a BBC period drama in that St. Patrick’s outfit.
And her “sartorial weapon of choice” long has been her Meghan Look Book.
I think this is all a distraction from her lack of new clothes. Since becoming POW almost everything is a re-wear (which is good!) and I believe the few new items might have been bought by Charles but not yet worn. The tabloids have little else they can say about Kate and now there aren’t any new clothes so this ridiculous Kate’s rode to being queen is shoulder pads.
She’s going for the illusion of an hourglass figure imo. This can be achieved by strategically placed padding. Christian Dior literally wove magic with this when he introduced The New Look in the 1950s. Very clever darts that “curve” around waist and hips, and padding sewn in around the hips accentuate or create an hourglass figure and it’s incredibly structured. I sew many of my own clothes, and love vintage patterns from this era which incorporate the darts and cut of this style, and you can also have the padding for hips in some patterns as well. If you’re larger (like me), you can emphasize the bust and hips, but visually reduce the waist. If you are completely straight and very slim, you can still visually create an hourglass figure. I saw the Christian Dior exhibition a few years ago at the V&A, and it was incredible, with all Dior’s sketches, samples of construction and toiles of coats and dresses. This, imo, is what McButtons has done with the green coat. It’s extremely expensive, unless you make your clothes yourself. Just as Bulliam had his “hot single Dad” phase, Kitty is going for Bombshell, unless she wants Pale, Delicate and Wan, when she then reverts to blouses, drape trousers etc
I can’t imagine the amount of spin going on with these two, worse than a washing machine on 1800 rpm.
The vibration from the spin must set their staff’s teeth on edge (what’s left of their staff, that is).
Boy, the lint on that green coat bugs. I keep trying to brush it off my screen.
She’s added more padding and not just at the shoulders, but in the bust and hips. I’m so bugged by the mix of blue greens and yellow greens.
So .. “she steps out in expertly tailored blazers…” does she. The writer obviously didn’t see her in that brown blazer a few weeks back that looked way too big as though it had been slept in. Expertly tailored my foot.
A friend of a friend who is a nurse at the hospital said it was an open secret Kate was hospitalised for Crohn’s disease so it could be a stoma bag she is hiding under the padding.
There have been a lot of friends of friends who knew 100% where Kate was (tx was the biggest one) but many here theorised it was related to something else. Maybe they found precancerous cells, but cancer patients here don’t believe she had cancer. She wore a very form fitting dress at Wimbledon.