On April 29, 2011 at 11 a.m., Kate Middleton linked arms with her father, Michael Middleton, and walked 318 feet down the aisle at Westminster Abbey to exchange vows with Prince William in front of 1,900 friends, family members, and global luminaries. Those were just the people watching from inside the cathedral, of course; the wedding was broadcast on television in more than 180 countries, and the YouTube streams alone attracted 72 million viewers.
The spring day brought the most attention to the British royal family since the August 1997 death of Princess Diana—and this time, it was almost universally positive. There was a halo effect for the rest of the family too, with global search interest in Queen Elizabeth that month reaching nearly at the level it would reach during her Diamond Jubilee in June 2012, according to Google Trends. In the decade that has followed, the British royals have been operating under a media spotlight brighter than anything since Diana’s heyday, with Kate and William—and later, to much internal strife, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—emerging as global celebrities. By the time of Harry and his cousin Princess Eugenie’s weddings in 2018, a televised royal wedding seemed like the only natural option. But it was only the media explosion surrounding William and Kate that made that possible.
For American royal watchers who woke up at dawn to watch William and Kate’s wedding, it was an obvious reminder of a similar day in 1981, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Though the 2011 ceremony was smaller, and Kate’s dress wasn’t nearly as voluminous as her late mother-in-law’s, it captured a similar amount of global adoration, and launched a new celebrity in the process. Kate’s popularity—and it is Kate, not William, who has seldom driven as much web traffic as his wife since they were married—transformed royal watching from an old-fashioned pastime into a digital business model, and the changes have been playing out for the whole family ever since.
From the time she was first publicly suspected to be William’s girlfriend in early 2004, Kate was an occasional presence in the British tabloids. But it wasn’t until news of the couple’s engagement in November 2010 that she became a global figure—and that one of the central features of her media appeal would become clear. At a St. James Palace photo op to announce the engagement, Kate wore a dark blue wrap dress from the London brand Issa, and within 24 hours the dress had sold out on MatchesFashion.com and in British department stores. A similar phenomenon continued with her subsequent outfits, and by early 2012, tabloids and fashion commentators were referring to it as the “Kate effect.”
In the run-up to the wedding, the coverage was increasingly thorough in the British tabloids as well as in the rest of the world. A network of blogs sprouted up devoted to identifying Kate’s outfits in official photos, and the most popular ones, Kate Middleton Style and What Kate Wore, are still updated today. The wedding was also an opportunity for the royal family to promote their digital presence. Though the family started their YouTube channel in 2007, it was a central part of their communications plan for the day, and they had a countdown timer to the beginning of the wedding up for more than a week.
But the truly viral moment from the wedding proved that the global public could also invest their interest in someone who wasn’t properly royal. As Kate walked down the aisle, the camera followed Kate’s younger sister, Pippa Middleton, who was holding the train of Kate’s Alexander McQueen dress. Pippa, who served as her sister’s maid of honor and wrangled the younger children in the wedding party, wore a curve-hugging ivory dress also designed by Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton. Her “derrière” eventually became one of the main talking points in news coverage the next day. Parody Twitter accounts and Facebook groups sprung up, plastic surgeons tried to capitalize by naming a procedure after her, and she was such a topic of conversation that even Justin Timberlake felt obliged to contribute some praise.
Though it wasn’t the only viral moment from the wedding, it had staying power and turned Pippa into a proto-influencer. The next day, the Daily Mail ran interviews with old friends about her partying habits and featured a photograph of her wearing a minidress made out of toilet paper. She eventually became a columnist at the Telegraph and a Vanity Fair contributor who covered British society calendar events like Royal Ascot and Wimbledon. Pippa’s rapid transformation from anonymous 20-something to hyper-surveilled socialite was an early example of the way that social media can create main characters that come to dominate conversation offline too.
Pippa’s instant fame came as journalistic institutions were just beginning to invest in the techniques that blogs and digital publications had been developing for years. A few weeks after the wedding, a columnist at the New Statesman discussed, with a bit of dismay, the fact that the Daily Mail had used a few crude tricks to ensure Google ranked its stories about Pippa highly. In the years that followed, SEO strategies and attention to trending topics have become standard, and the Daily Mail became an international destination for celebrity news due in part to their aggressive pursuit of traffic.
Photographed almost constantly during their official duties, the royal family is an ideal subject for the limitless column inches of the internet. When photo licensing went digital in the mid-2000s, photographs once only available to wire services were suddenly everywhere, meaning anyone could take the time to run 10 photographs of Kate’s blouse and shoes—and get the traffic bump as a result. It’s not the kind of story that would appeal to every Daily Express reader, but as outlets like BuzzFeed would learn throughout the 2010s, appealing to a niche demographic with low-cost content could pay off. A passionate audience, raised on stories of Diana’s charisma and admiration for the queen as an icon of aging, was ready to see Kate take on the mantle, and click they did.
By the time Harry began dating Meghan Markle, there was a finely tuned machine ready to turn every new royal story line into content. In fact, Pippa’s experience in the spotlight played out almost exactly as Meghan’s would nearly six years later, with a few important exceptions. Though Kate didn’t seem to resent the attention bestowed on her younger sister, palace aides were reportedly upset with the outcome—and blamed Pippa herself for the turn of events. She was treated with a similar lack of sympathy in the British press. A few weeks after the wedding, paparazzi followed Pippa on a trip to the hair salon, and one commentator remarked, “If you were camera shy, would you opt for a King’s Road hair appointment?” Eventually the attention around Pippa died down, and she was able to return to a relatively normal life. Her 2017 wedding was front-page news, but not necessarily a celebrity-laden blowout. She now lives fairly quietly in London with her husband and two children.
According to the biography Finding Freedom by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, nearly all of the press officers who were working in Kensington Palace in 2011 were gone by the time the maelstrom came for the family again. Still, some of the same attitudes about handling the press persisted throughout Meghan’s time in the palace, from surprise at the virulence of social media comments that led the palace to institute a moderation policy in 2019 to Meghan’s feeling that she was trapped inside because courtiers thought she was “overexposed.”
As early as the now notorious 2016 headline “Harry’s New Girl Is (Almost) Straight Outta Compton,” the attention heaped on Meghan was just as prurient as tabloid conversation about Kate, but much more acidic. There was also more of it—a 2019 study showed that search interest in Meghan was 35% higher than that of her sister-in-law. Throughout her early years as a duchess, Kate’s battles with the press—like the 2012 topless photos taken in France or the intrusions onto Anmer Hall grounds when Prince George and Princess Charlotte were young—were solved by quiet legal action, appeasement in the form of occasional family photos, and a bit of arm twisting. It all happened with the full support of the palace, something Meghan has said she never got.
When Diana joined the royal family, she too was followed by photographers and constantly plastered on the covers of magazines around the world, but the stories were accompanied by venomous insider gossip that sensationalized her real emotional troubles. When Kate married William, a similar process began again, at a much faster speed and a slightly smaller scope, because her inner circle and palace staff seemed committed to keeping her private life off the table. Kate has subsequently been open about feeling overwhelmed by early motherhood, but she was able to make those disclosures on her own terms, which seems like it might be the only way to survive life in the royal bubble.
Ten years after marrying her prince, Kate has become more confident as a public figure and grown increasingly comfortable in her role as a duchess. She has mastered the art of small talk at engagements and aligned with charities she is passionate about, all while supplying a steady stream of covetable outfits. She’s in many ways nothing like the woman who walked down the aisle, yet we watched her get here one day at a time.
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