Out and about in Vancouver with Prince Harry for the 2025 Invictus Games, Meghan Markle took a leaf from the style playbook of one famously glamorous relative. To watch the finals of the wheelchair basketball over the weekend, the Duchess of Sussex donned a simple but elegant outfit: a navy jumper, flared jeans and heeled boots. But it was a distinctive blazer, thrown casually over the top of her look, that caused royal fans to do a double take.
The slate gray, tweed Duccio jacket from Californian brand Dôen—which features two lines of faux-leather buttons, exaggerated lapels and a chocolate brown, velvet collar—looked remarkably similar to one worn years before by Meghan’s late mother-in-law. Princess Diana donned her gray pinstripe coat with a velvet collar numerous times, first stepping out in the design on a visit to a health center in Lisson Grove, London, in 1984—when she styled it with black heels, a white shirt and a ribbon bow-tie. A few months later, she wore almost the exact same look for a trip to Barnado’s children’s charity, although this time, she debuted a brand new, slightly longer hairstyle that also hit the headlines.
Diana continued to wear her favorite coat for several years, made bespoke for her by London-based designer Jan Van Velden, who was responsible for several other famous outfits in her wardrobe (such as the red suit the Princess wore to leave St. Mary’s Hospital with her newborn son, Prince Harry, in 1984). The timeless gray style, however, was one of her most popular, which makes it little surprise that both of Diana’s daughters-in-law have similar pieces in their own wardrobes. On a visit to Essex in 2018, the then Duchess of Cambridge debuted a black-and-white tweed Smythe blazer with a velvet collar, which she teamed—like Meghan—with a low-key outfit of jeans and a jumper.
