In keeping with a long and proud institutional tradition of being all over the Windsors, for May Vanity Fair has rolled out a whole “Love and Royals” edition of the magazine that goes very, very hard on the royals generally and the royal wedding specifically.
Editor-in-chief Radhika Jones kicks it off with an a note musing what it might mean to girls today, offering up a princess like Meghan Markle—“a self-made woman, bi-racial, the first in her family to graduate from college, with a passion for social justice, and who in the face of bigoted remarks about her background conducts herself with grace and authenticity.”
There’s a particularly interesting piece by Josh Duboff about one of the trickiest aspects of joining the royal family: how do you keep your friends when every tabloid in the English-speaking world would be delighted to wrest an exclusive out of them? How can you marry Harry and do anything other than pull up all the social drawbridges, particularly in this era of ubiquitous social media and cameras? But while certain members of her family can’t seem to shut the hell up—if the tabs stopped taking her calls, Samantha Grant would probably be waiting on the porch to yell at the mailman every day—her friends seem to be playing it properly close to the chest.
The tidbits we do know about her (very fancy) Toronto crew are especially interesting. “I wouldn’t say she was the type to be out every single night, but I would say that she was pretty selective about the events she did attend, and that crowd was Toronto society,” explained Lainey Gossip herself, Elaine Lui. And they’re not saying shit:
[Friend Jessica] Mulroney reportedly visited Markle in London for four days in January to help her with her wedding-dress fittings, and was not so much as photographed the entire time she was there. Last September, Markle wore one of [designer Misha] Nonoo’s designs (a white blouse called the Husband Shirt!) to the Invictus Games, an event founded by Prince Harry, but Nonoo refuses to comment on how Markle’s endorsement may have affected sales. (Markle brought Anderson along to the games, a full-circle friendship moment for the pair.) “Her Harry-era crew is totally on lockdown,” Lui notes. “I think that’s super-smart of them, because, first, they’re hoping for an invitation [to the wedding]—why would you jeopardize that? And number two, her social circle in Toronto is quite affluent. They don’t need to sell a story to the Daily Mail for $10,000.”
Making hay of the flourishing royal book economy, there’s also an excerpt from American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry by Leslie Carroll, delving into Meghan’s background and early years, as well as a piece on the couple’s courtship “adapted and expanded” from Harry: Life, Loss, and Love by royal commentator Katie Nicholl, which says that the Queen herself is team Meghan:
The Queen has gone out of her way to include Meghan from the outset, from inviting the actress to Buckingham Palace for tea to welcoming her to the family’s Christmas celebrations at Sandringham, in Norfolk, a tradition previously only ever reserved for spouses. And behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace, Meghan has gone down as a great success. “The Queen likes her, and she charmed the Duke of Edinburgh over Christmas. He was very impressed by her intellect and how well read she was,” says a family friend.
This is going to sell so, so, so many copies.