Princess Kate’s Favorite Brands are All Going Into Administration—What’s Going On?

Princess Kate and her fashion confidantes received some bad news earlier this month: LK Bennett, a brand once synonymous with Kate’s style, has started administration proceedings. The British brand is looking for a new buyer to avoid total collapse. While the store was once a staple of the high street—the main shopping streets in the United Kingdom, similar to the biggest shops in major shopping malls in the US—and a go-to for summer social season events like races and weddings, it seems to be on the brink of closing down altogether.

At the same time, one of Princess Kate’s favored brands, Tabitha Webb, also filed for administration. ​Many high street brands are slowly disappearing, with brands once favored by the Princess of Wales ceasing to exist. “Very few premium high street brands have survived in their original form,” a fashion retail source told Drapers. “If you look at the market pre-Covid versus today, most premium players have either been rescued, shrunk significantly or disappeared altogether,” he added, citing some of Princess Kate’s favorite brands of the 2010s like Whistles, Hobbs, Jaeger, and Ted Baker, all of whom were acquired by other companies.

“It’s not really a question of where LK Bennett went wrong, but about what’s happened to the premium high street market,” the retail analyst said to Drapers. While the Kate Effect—the economic phenomenon when a brand is positively impacted when Princess Kate wears their designs—used to mean instant success for brands, it seem that success is not eternal.

Royal fashion expert Monica Marriott-Mills from @themonicaway weighed in on the shift, saying “there are many reasons why high street brands are struggling which I will leave to economic experts, but from a fashion and styling point of view, I have noticed there's a huge shift in our purchasing decisions.”

“Many of us are no longer buying as much or as trend-focused, as we have seen in previous years,” Marriott-Mills explains. “There’s been a huge notion to invest in key pieces and to buy less," she said, adding "we are focusing more-so on high-quality basics and only buying them once, rather than always trying to buy the next best thing.”

A source explained to Drapers that in the UK “we’re basically over-shopped,” adding that “it’s pretty cutthroat” in the British premium retail market. Rather than purchasing a new dress every race season, many women are choosing to rewear items over and over again, making brands like LK Bennett less relevant, and less necessary. “We have seen this quite often with [Princess] Kate,” Marriott-Mills explains. “She chooses to “outfit repeat” and to re-wear her pieces many times, sometimes over the course of up to ten and twenty years!”