It seems like it was great being Meghan Markle in the summer of 2016. You’re on a hit—if not critically acclaimed—TV show. You’re 34, comfortable in your own skin, but still young and hot. (Sorry to be crass, but it’s true.) You have a fairly successful lifestyle blog; it’s nothing special, but it makes you feel like you’ve really got a passion project. You advocate vaguely for the rights of women and girls worldwide. And then you’re in London for work and your friend sets you up with the world’s most eligible bachelor, a literal prince—and even better, you hit it off.
Then Meghan’s life famously pivoted. Suits ended; she moved to London; she married Prince Harry in an international television event; she gave birth to her firstborn, Archie, who is now sixth in line to the throne. She was also treated horrifically by the British tabloid press, even by its notoriously terrible standards, and it severely impacted her mental health. By early 2020, Meghan and Harry had quit their official royal duties and moved back to North America.
So, look, I can see why Meghan might want to return to 2016, or at least emulate its naively optimistic vibes—because that’s certainly what it seems like she’s trying to do with what she’s putting out into the world these days. Everything—from her foodstuffs brand to her podcast interviewing female founders to her incomprehensible Netflix show and, above all, her Instagram posts—all reeks of the mid-2010s, which is to say, it’s all very millennial cringe. (As a millennial, I’m allowed to say that.) This week, for example, she mused aloud about starting a business with her daughter during a podcast interview with Tina Knowles, and posted a throwback video of her and Harry dancing in the delivery room to the “Baby Momma” song (a YouTube classic from, you guessed it, 2014). Each of those developments has, like every other piece of Meghan content, put me into an irritated, confused spiral of asking things like, why is this happening in the year of our lord 2025? And, more importantly, who the fuck is this for??
Since her show premiered earlier this year, Meghan has been active on Instagram. It’s as if, after years of a royalty-and-then-presumably-lawyer-imposed social media blackout, she can’t help herself; she’s bingeing. And these posts have reached a level of basicness that is impossible to compare to anything else besides the lifestyle influencers of the mid-2010s; the ones who, much like Meghan, probably started out blogging before pivoting to Instagram. (Your Cupcakes & Cashmeres; your Lee From Americas; Karlie Kloss’s YouTube channel). She’s captioning a carousel of photos of her in a box at the Cowboy Carter tour, “about last night.” She’s constantly filming her massive garden through a gauzy filter. (Did Instagram bring Valencia back just for her?) She’s posting three different grid posts about her daughter’s fourth birthday.
Her podcast might be the most egregiously mid-2010s of everything, though; even its name, Confessions of a Female Founder, makes me pull a Nick Young face. (Please appreciate that that meme is from 2014.) Tonally, it’s the more-thoughtful, older sister of the Lean In girlboss—but at its core, its message is that the primary way to achieve women’s rights is for women to make a lot of money from their companies. At a moment when women’s actual bodily rights are very much under attack, launching a podcast focusing on the woes of women staying up late stressing over the design of their product labels is offensively out of touch. It really sounds as if Meghan and her guests might be wearing “Entrepreneurs for Hillary” T-shirts as they record. (I guarantee you they all bought Lingua Franca sweaters embroidered with “nasty woman” in 2017.)
Meanwhile, she’s also attempting a Martha Stewart-Gwenyth Paltrow-Chrissy Teigen thing. Her Netflix show offering tips and tricks for hosting and “elevating the everyday” is heavily predicated on the thing these incredibly rich women all have in common: a huge, blandly beautiful house; a huge, blandly beautiful kitchen; and unlimited funds. But Meghan also has some perverse compunction to be relatable, so she occasionally drops phrases like “budget friendly,” and in order to profit off of her carefully curated coastal-grandmother-ass-vibe, she’s not selling $800 sweaters, but cookie mixes and ginger tea for under $20.
Here I must pause and note that Meghan is literally royalty (by marriage but it very much still counts). She’s a princess in the only nation where that really even means anything anymore. Yes, the royal family is bad, etc., but it’s not like she’s pivoted to smuggling pregnant women across state borders to get life-saving abortions or something. She could be covered in diamonds and ermine, eating off dinner plates Henry VII used, but instead she’s (re)wearing a beige Loro Piana sweater t-shirt while sitting in Jenni Kayne chairs like the rest of the multi-millionaires in California. It’s so boring!
I know I’m dangerously close to echoing a right-wing tabloid columnist and verging on some perverted Meghan Markle horseshoe theory. I also know “princess” isn’t even a viable career path for anyone these days. She had the only open position, though, and she gave it up to be one of countless people to talk about “seed funding” on a podcast and photograph staged lifestyle content.
She seems intent on founding an empire of … something. But I have no clue what it is. And I’m just not sure the way to do it is repackaging her 2016 influencer dreams.
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Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
