Margaret Atwood is a 75-year-old living legend. She is a poet, inventor, humanist, novelist and Canadian. She is wry and forward-thinking. She is amazing. Go here to read her Wiki. For some reason, someone asked Margaret Atwood what she thought about Duchess Kate’s style. Surprisingly, Atwood had an opinion. Incidentally, I don’t think this is anti-feminist or anything, to ask a living legend like Atwood about something superficial like Kate’s style. For all we know, this came up organically within a longer interview. And who says that we can’t be good at our jobs AND have an opinion on Kate’s style, you know?

Her style is followed by women across the globe and whatever she wears is sure to sell out within minutes. Yet the Duchess of Cambridge has been dismissed as an ‘uneventful’ dresser by leading author Margaret Atwood.

‘I think she dresses quite uneventfully,’ the author of The Handmaid’s Tale said. ‘I think she’s watching her back, I think she probably has people who pretty much tell her what is appropriate for her to wear. I don’t think she’s become the fashion plate that Diana was, and I think she’s probably doing that advisably, wouldn’t you say?’

Miss Atwood is just the latest high-profile female writer to apparently attack the duchess’s image and public persona. Double Booker Prize winner and Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel has described Kate as a ‘shop window mannequin’ and a ‘machine-made’ princess who has been ‘designed by committee’. Meanwhile Sandi Toksvig has said the duchess doesn’t have a ‘single opinion’ of her own, and Joan Smith caused outrage by labelling Kate ‘unambitious and bland’.

Speaking at a talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Miss Atwood, who has also won the Booker for The Blind Assassin, admitted she judges women on the clothing they wear. The novelist, who has been described as a feminist writer, said: ‘Let’s pretend you’re meeting a person for the first time, as you do when you meet a character in a book. What do I see? Your dress, I see your face of course, I focus on that. I see your earrings, I see your necklace, and those are all part of you. They are all part of the total image of who I’ve just met.’

[From The Daily Mail]

All of those descriptors fit Kate: she is uneventful, bland, unambitious, designed by a committee, etc. But let’s be real – we would always find something to bitch about with Kate. That’s the nature of her role at this point. I would hope that after four years with The Firm, she would have learned to put on panties, stop fiddling with her hair during events and find a way to at least feign professionalism, but I do get the impression that Kate is “dull” on purpose, because that’s the way William wants her, and that’s the way the senior royals want her. And here’s something nice: her style was SO MUCH better during her second pregnancy. Seriously. She managed to dress appropriately and almost conservatively for the entire pregnancy.

Photos courtesy of WENN.