Did Queen Elizabeth Hate Kate Middleton’s Wedding Dress? A Resurfaced Video Shows Her Calling It ‘Horrid’
April 25, 2023 by Marissa Matozzo
It’s been 12 years since Kate Middleton married Prince William in one of the most talked-about royal weddings in recent history. But while many have praised her elegant and stunning Alexander McQueen wedding dress, it seems that not everyone was a fan.
A video resurfaced on social media last week showing none other than the late Queen Elizabeth herself deeming the dress to be “horrid.” This has left many people wondering: did the queen really hate Princess Kate’s wedding dress? We’ll explore this question and take a closer look at the viral TikTok clip.
After the April 29, 2011 wedding day itself, the lace-adorned, low-cut, long-sleeved dress was put on display at Buckingham Palace. This, as Newsweek notes, was part of a special royal wedding exhibition for members of the public to view.
Before the opening of the exhibition, the Duchess of Cambridge and Queen Elizabeth II toured these displays, as seen in the TikTok video, uploaded by user the.royal.watcher and viewed over 700,000 times. The monarch wasn’t overly passionate or excited about Princess Kate’s wedding dress, which was mounted on an invisible mannequin with the bridal veil. The Cartier tiara was placed over an absent head.
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In the clip, the queen can be heard commenting to Princess Kate that the dress and tiara was “horrid, isn’t it,” (although some fans think she meant the floating style display and not the dress itself).”Without my face there?” Kate then replied in the video shot by news cameras that previewed the exhibition. “Horrible…dreadful,” the queen replied, as one fan in the comment section noted, seemingly “joking.”
Another wrote about the queen, “She had some sarcasm sometimes. Catch her smile! Think she was joking. But… who knows. The clips a bit short to really tell.” Someone else added, “bless the Queen, she always spoke her mind” as another imagined being Kate in that moment: “I’d literally shrivel up and die omg.”
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So… was the queen really kidding? In an interview with Newsweek, royal expert Christine Ross said that this incident of Elizabeth chatting with Kate about the dress was indeed a quintessential example of Elizabeth’s good humor.
“The queen famously had a very good sense of humor, but it was undeniably a dry sense of humor,” she said. She added, “The lighting and headless mannequin gave this display a macabre feeling, which the queen pointed out straight away. Kate and the queen joked about the nature of the display.”
The queen, Newsweek writes, was “well versed in the idea of loaning out her dresses for fashion exhibitions,” though is reported to have not been “overly fond of seeing her wardrobes empty” and dresses out on display for all to see.
This, the expert stressed, is probably why she seemed less than happy about Kate’s wedding dress display, which confused many viewers of the clip who suspected she “hated” the dress or that “her real negative feelings about the dress came out,” as another wrote. No bad blood here after all!