The
Duchess of Sussex opens an online lifestyle shop with what looks like an image on a tablecloth on
Instagram and is apparently looking for a CEO. It has an absurd name –
American Riviera Orchard – like a vague Satnav direction. Perhaps vagueness is the point. Lifestyle products are more style than life, and she will apparently sell jams, oils and cook wear . The style is the life. They speak to the socially insecure: to the yearning. That is why Fortnum & Mason can sell jam for £5.95 a pot. You’re not buying the jam. Or not just the jam. You’re buying proximity to the people you think buy the jam. It’s all a hoax designed to grift the middle classes. Meghan is selling class in bottled form : there is even, in a glorious metaphor, a waiting list. And, like any common magician, she offers the ability to transform through the application of potions. I don’t mind this because I never believed that she and Harry were real advocates for social justice – the idea of progressive princes is absurd now – and because I understand that protecting her children from lunatics is expensive , and because I sense that yearning for transformative magic in Meghan herself. Her childhood was, in her own words, an uneasy negotiation between worlds and before she was an
Actor she was a calligrapher, who strives to make mundane things beautiful. Mad monarchists are responsible for most royal woes – they read about them and insist on the intrusion that destroys them – so those who condemn Meghan for selling magic jam should remember this. Read Next I’ll buy whatever
Meghan Markle is selling The
Royal Family do it too. If you browse the royal palaces online shop, and I do, you understand that the Royal Family is also selling a lifestyle brand, and not just in the tatty shops attached to their ancestral homes. They sell to the kingdom, the Commonwealth, the world. They are all salespeople. Meghan has simply returned to the family business. Before she was chased away, I sensed Meghan would be good at this. Though people laughed when she signed bananas for sex workers (with messages like “you are special”, “you are brave”), she had a marketable warmth and anxiety. The Windsors may be the ultimate lifestyle brand. You see it in the palace shop. It’s incoherent: a sea of tat. There are shower caps, a Corgi keyring (the late
Queen loved corgis, though I doubt she met a keyring), crown jewels chocolate, trinkets and more. I once found a chef’s outfit, a maid’s outfit, and a wooden spoon, but they may have been exiled on equality grounds. Most of it speaks, though subconsciously, to the idea that the Royal Family are toys, and you can eat like them, smell like them, dress like them, and, when that pleasure is done, dispose of them. At some point they became victims, and now they know it. Meghan’s magic jam is tribute, not theft.