Princess Kate References Princess Diana With This Baby-Blue Look
She references the late royal at Trooping the Colour 2026
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Trooping the Colour is the one royal occasion where the fashion stakes are as high as the pageantry, and Princess Kate has never once fumbled the assignment. This year, she arrived at the London celebration in a powder-blue Catherine Walker coat-dress — the kind of look that reads effortless precisely because every detail has been thought through.
The piece, called the Lafayette, is a tailored double-breasted coat-dress built on deliberate contrast: sharp shoulders, angular white-trimmed lapels, and princess seams at the waist give it structure, while the relaxed midi skirt and that barely-there blue keep it from ever feeling stiff. Fabric-covered buttons disappear seamlessly into the coat — a small, intentional choice that separates good tailoring from great tailoring. Kate completed the look with a coordinating Philip Treacy fascinator, pearl earrings and bracelet, and white Gianvito Rossi pumps.
The Diana Thread
The choice of Catherine Walker wasn't incidental. According to Harper's Bazaar, Walker was one of Princess Diana's most trusted designers — responsible for over a thousand looks that helped define the late royal's visual legacy. Among them: a pale-blue double-breasted coat with white trim worn on Easter 1987 that bears a striking resemblance to what Kate wore today. Whether the reference was deliberate or simply the result of two women with impeccable taste gravitating toward the same designer's sensibility, the visual echo is impossible to miss.
The Wales children leaned into the moment too. Princes George and Louis wore light-blue ties, and Princess Charlotte matched her mother's energy in a white dress with a coordinating hair bow — proof that the family's approach to dressing for these occasions is very much a group effort.
What makes the look work isn't the royal occasion or the inevitable Diana comparison — it's that Kate understands the difference between wearing clothes and using them, and a coat-dress this considered is its own kind of statement.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
