Roland Mouret has revealed how a single phone call from his team ended a years-long friendship with Meghan Markle.
The French designer, 63, recounts the 2016 fallout in his new memoir, “I Am Roland Mouret: The Butcher’s Boy Who Dressed the World,” in an excerpt published Friday by The Times. Mouret had offered to send clothes to Markle, then 35, shortly after she began dating Prince Harry, instructing his staff to “leave them there as long as she wants them” and to “don’t follow up on it and do not talk about it to anyone at all, here or outside.”
The trouble began after the relationship became public. Mouret writes that the same employee “decided, in an honest attempt to be efficient, to call Kate’s stylist at the palace and ask for Meghan’s dresses to be returned.”
“Meghan was furious and called me,” Mouret writes. “You don’t realise what you’ve done! You’ve embarrassed me!”
Mouret said he apologized directly, acknowledging that she had wanted everything handled privately. Her response, he recalls, shut the door completely: “You know now I can never wear your clothes again.”
“I didn’t see the logic of that but I didn’t question it,” Mouret writes in the memoir. “Meghan’s decision not to wear my clothes was hers, not the palace’s, not anybody else’s. I don’t think anyone else cared.”
The rift deepened the following year when Mouret spotted Markle wearing what he described as “a cheap high street copy” of one of his designs. He messaged her directly with an offer to reconcile.
“I can understand if you don’t wear my stuff, but if it’s to wear a cheap copy then that’s ridiculous. Come back,” he writes that he told her.
Her reply suggested a thaw: “I think I should come and see you.”
Whether that meeting ever happened, Mouret does not say.
The episode offers a rare glimpse into Markle’s early, pre-royal sensitivities about privacy and palace protocol. At the time, she was still an American actress navigating an unprecedented transition into Britain’s most scrutinized family.
The designer’s account also surfaces against the long-documented tension between Markle and Kate Middleton, 43. During her 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, Markle reversed a widely circulated narrative that she had made Middleton cry before the 2018 royal wedding, stating instead that it was Middleton who reduced her to tears over flower-girl dresses.
“There wasn’t a confrontation,” Markle said in the televised sit-down. “I don’t think it’s fair to her to get into the details because she apologized, and I’ve forgiven her.”
“It was a really hard week of the wedding and she was upset about something, but she owned it, and she apologized, and she brought me flowers and a note, apologizing,” Markle continued, calling Middleton “a good person,” She added that the media “really seemed to want a narrative of a hero and a villain.”
“If you love me, you don’t have to hate her. And if you love her, you don’t need to hate me,” she said.
Recent reports that the Sussexes planned to apologize to Prince William and Middleton for the Oprah interview were dismissed as “total rubbish” by royal journalist Tom Sykes earlier this week. “Harry has always said he will never apologize for anything,” said Sykes, author of “The Dukes.”
Royal commentator Kinsey Schofield echoed that skepticism. “Prince Harry and Meghan remain defiant,” the “Kinsey Schofield Unfiltered” podcast host stated. “If anything, the pattern has remained consistent. I would treat claims that they now regret Oprah and are preparing to ‘eat crow’ with serious skepticism.”
Mouret’s memoir, published by Penguin, arrives as the Sussexes have reportedly relocated back to the United Kingdom with their children, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5.