Six Years Ago, Princess Beatrice Became Only the Second Member of the British Royal Family to Ever Attend the Met Gala

It’s a bit shocking how few members of the British royal family have attended the Met Gala—only two, actually. Princess Diana, as connected to fashion and culture as she was, only attended once, in 1996; her niece, Princess Beatrice, attended in 2018, 22 years later. And that’s it.

For her first (and so far only) Met six years ago, Beatrice wore purple, the color perhaps most associated with royalty. The 2018 Met was held on Monday, May 7—less than two weeks out from her cousin Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle that May 19. Beatrice, per Newsweek, was working in New York City at the time; she would later return to her native U.K. and married her husband, Edoardo Mapelli-Mozzi, in 2020. Tatler called Bea’s lone Met appearance “a welcome sight on the NYC fashion circuit,” and for her Met debut wore a floor-length chiffon Alberta Ferretti gown “with an impressive nod to the Tudors,” the outlet wrote. “High-neck, embellishment, and an Anne Boleyn-style headpiece.” 

The gown featured billowing sleeves and embellishments along the neck, “a nod to the night’s Catholic-inspired theme,” People reported. (The 2018 gala’s theme was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.") Beatrice’s gown was described by outlets as regal, Grecian, and, as People wrote, “relatively simple,” especially when compared to the night’s other attendees. To accessorize, she wore gold sandals and carried a black clutch.

If the Met’s chair Anna Wintour could see anyone ascend the steps at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday in May, who would it be? Well, it’d be royalty, actually—a double dose of it. In 2019, she told Today host Jenna Bush Hager that her dream Met guests would be Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, sans their respective husbands Prince William and Prince Harry.

“I would love to have the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cambridge [Kate’s title at the time—she’s now the Princess of Wales] together,” Wintour said. “That would be my dream couple. They could leave their husbands at home. It’s the two of them I want.”