In March 2002, Charlotte Todd was a textile student at the University of the West of England in Bristol. When her professor asked her if she could send a sample from her collection to participate in an upcoming charity fashion show at the University of St. Andrews, she could not have imagined what was about to happen.
According to the Telegraph, the skirt she chose to borrow had taken her a week to hand-knit using silk yarn. It had cost her £30 to make, plus postage to send it to Scotland. It was added to a line of clothes lent by students from across the UK.
Of all the options available, Kate Middleton, then a first-year student at St. Andrews and a volunteer model, chose to wear Todd’s creation to the show. The sheer skirt became a dress, styled with a black bra and panties, Kate’s hair was curled into tight curls and braided with strips of fabric.
The photos made local news at the time. Eight years later, they were published worldwide and seen by millions when Prince William introduced his new fiancée, the future Princess of Wales.
Now, Netflix has released the first image of actress Meg Bellamy recreating Kate’s look in The Crown. The second part of the sixth series will show Kate and William in their university days, including the moment he saw Kate wearing that dress from the first series and by all accounts went crazy.
What happened to Kate Middleton's dress
Initially, the dress was placed in the back of Todd's wardrobe and stayed there. Todd completed her studies and went on to work in the gift shop at the Bristol Aquarium. But when Kate and William announced their engagement on October 20, 2010, reporters began contacting Todd to ask her more about the dress that sparked the royal affair.
“The dress is a piece of fashion history, the moment when William could have first fallen in love with Kate, and that makes me really proud,” she said in November 2010. “That photo has been used so much over the years. I always wonder if he’s embarrassed by it or if she likes it. I’m hesitant to part with the dress.”
Todd vowed never to sell it. “The only person I would probably give it to is her (Kate Middleton),” she said. “Maybe in exchange for a wedding invitation.”
When a newspaper offered her £1,000 for the dress, Todd declined. But eventually, with the engagement, she realized the significance and potential value of the piece gathering dust in her closet.
“My office first got a call from Charlotte’s brother to say we had this dress that Kate Middleton wore to St Andrews,” Kerry Taylor, a London-based auctioneer, tells the Telegraph. “I knew straight away that the press interest in this item was going to be huge.”
Charlotte, who worked at the aquarium and was now married, had asked her brother to make a few phone calls and sent the dress to Taylor in a small box. “Really, if you were hoping to catch the eye of a prince, this was the dress to do it in.”
On the day of the auction itself, in March 2011, Taylor says the frenzy was unlike anything she’s experienced in her 40-plus years as a professional auctioneer. Taylor has sold pieces that belonged to Princess Diana, Jerry Hall and Elizabeth Taylor, but the mob of paparazzi and journalists waiting to see who had bought Kate’s dress was even bigger.
When Taylor sold the dress for £78,000 to a telephone bidder, she had to meet his agent in a locked room for security reasons. “Everyone thought it was William on the other end of the phone,” she laughs. “It wasn’t. It was a private collector from Jersey.”
