Monday Musings on Meghan

I wrote this yesterday with the intent to finish it in the evening and get it out, but the best laid plans sometimes go awry. In this case, a sick toddler has thrown my week into chaos, but we will get back on track. The Prince and Princess of Wales attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace today, and I will cover that in tomorrow’s newsletter.

It’s Monday, and we already have a promising week ahead, because William and Kate will travel to Scotstoun, Scotland, on Thursday to attend the naming ceremony of HMS Glasgow at the BAE Systems’ shipyard. Today, I thought we’d take a moment to check in on Montecito. It is, after all, the seventh anniversary of Harry and Meghan’s no-expense-spared royal wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018.

Can you believe it has been seven years since their wedding? I haven’t rewatched their wedding since the big day (maybe I did once, I can’t be sure), but I am a little tempted to today, just to relive the highs, but mostly the lows. I didn’t know you could wreck a royal wedding, but somehow she managed to do it.

Today, Meghan posted another one of her “mood boards,” filled with unreleased images of the couple and a few of their children. Does everyone get this many posed, loved-up photos together? I might get one if we are on vacation with my younger sister, who is very good about making a casual moment a photo-shoot (GenZ talent, I guess), but Meghan has an exceptionally large selection of photo-shoot worthy smooshes.

In one sense, there is something clever about getting a lot of different pictures out in a mood board. But because Meghan has been so weirdly private about images, with, seemingly, the specific intent of increasing the buzz/clout of her photos when she does release them, these mood boards feel contrived. It’s like she gets a sense of validation from everyone spending a lot of energy to zoom in to all the various difficult-to-see images—the way we carefully analyze the background on a royal photo and zoom in on pictures in frames on the desks. It is like Meghan needs to manufacture her own buzz.

Meghan’s mostly dormant lifestyle brand, As Ever, which she could single-handedly run out of her garage right now, given the level of activity, wished its “founder” a happy anniversary. This just reminded me that As Ever hasn’t produced anything since April 2nd.

Although Meghan’s brand hasn’t restocked, her weekly podcast continues to make at least one headline a week. This past week, the big news was that Meghan doesn’t cook every night.

A while ago, I read something that suggested that there are people who eat fast food every single day. I asked ChatGPT about this, and it replied that: “Roughly 3 to 10 million Americans may rely primarily on fast food for dinner. This behavior is more common in urban areas, among those with lower incomes, or those working multiple jobs with limited time to cook.” On the other side of the economic spectrum, I was reading an interview of Lindsey Holt, founder of Lindsey Leigh Jewelry in Houston, Texas, and she mentioned something that seemed to suggest her family eats out most nights. She is a mother of three and runs a successful boutique jewelry company, but it still really surprised me and had me wondering how many people in America—across the socio-economic lines—don’t cook dinner most nights of the week? This is a very long-winded way of saying, to me, Meghan’s “confession” sounds wild; we cook dinner almost every night. Take-out is something I only resort to when I am at the end of my rope. But it didn’t sound like Meghan thought it was a significant confession, and I wonder to what extent dressing up take-out is actually commonplace. I will be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

The wrinkle is, of course, that Meghan has a lifestyle show in which she is teaching us about the joys of a home-cooked meal. It’s an unfortunate revelation for Meghan to have made. It would be better for people to wonder than to know. I just don’t think a brand built on simply elevating the every day has enough substance to run the distance.

Meghan also had a busy few weeks posting pictures from a Beyoncé concert and a James Taylor concert, with the caption on the latter noting she is “in [her] concert era.” There was plenty of content there for some basic influencing (stories slides), but she went with static, after-the-fact content. Missed opportunity, in my opinion.

In any event, Meghan teased us with a promise of new things she is “cooking up,” so we will have to wait and see what curve ball comes out of Montecito next.