Fashion trends come and go, but the royals tend to favour tradition, particularly when it comes to dressing their littles ones. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were spotted celebrating the Fourth of July as they watched a parade in Montecito with their children, Prince Archie, four, and two-year-old Princess Lilibet.
The snaps, shared by the New York Post, show Lilibet sporting a blue paisley-print hand-smocked dress with white socks and red buckled shoes.
It’s a classic style often favoured by the tot’s royal cousin, Princess Charlotte, at a similar age, but could the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and the Prince and Princess of Wales have taken inspiration from the archives?
Photographs of Princess Beatrice from her early childhood in the late 1980s/early 1990s show the Duke of York and Sarah, Duchess of York’s eldest daughter often wearing hand-smocked frocks with white socks and red buckled shoes.
And with bows in her auburn hair, little Beatrice very much reminds us of Lilibet, with her own strawberry-blonde locks.
Beatrice and her husband, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, are parents to daughter Sienna, who turns two in September.
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Royal watchers have also pointed out the resemblance between Archie and Harry’s cousin Princess Eugenie’s two-year-old son, August Brooksbank.
Harry and Eugenie share a close bond, with Eugenie visiting her cousin in Montecito last year. Footage from the Sussexes’ Netflix docuseries released last December showed the pair attending the Super Bowl, cycling, and playing with Archie on the beach.
When the Duke attended King Charles and Queen Camilla’s coronation in May, he was seen arriving at Westminster Abbey at the same time as his cousins, Princess Beatrice, Princess Eugenie and Zara Tindall.
The Duke was also in the UK just days after Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, welcomed their second child, Ernest. It’s possible that Harry could have popped in to see his cousin at her Ivy Cottage home in Kensington Palace to meet Eugenie’s newborn son, who was born on 30 May, before he returned to the US.
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