Long before she became Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton attracted Prince William’s attention with a daring transparent dress.
Here we tell you everything you need to know about this iconic garment and the exorbitant figure it fetched at auction.
Kate Middleton’s see through dress
By now, 12 years after their wedding, it is well known that Kate and William’s love blossomed when they were students at St Andrews University in Scotland.
However, their passion allegedly ignited not in the classroom, but at a charity fashion show where Middleton paraded in a daring see-through dress while William watched from the front row.
Pat Duncan, a friend of William’s during his college years, commented in an interview on the occasion of the Cambridge wedding in the spring of 2011, that he was present at the charity fashion show and confirmed that this was the moment when Prince William noticed Kate Middleton.
He assured that the prince was in the front row and when Kate came out “her eyes were popping out of their sockets”.
Key details about the dress
The transparent dress, which exposed her lingerie and slender figure, seemed unremarkable at the time. But in retrospect, it’s surprising, now that Middleton is a royal and global fashion icon.
- The dress was designed by Charlotte Todd for a charity fashion show in St Andrews in 2002.
- It was made of sheer black fabric that revealed the black lingerie underneath.
- The piece was a fitted silhouette with a scoop neckline and long sleeves and came to above the knee.
Nearly 10 years later, in 2011, Todd auctioned off the iconic dress amid the media frenzy over William and Catherine’s royal wedding.
She wasn’t sure it would sell, as it had been stored at her mother’s house for years.
But thanks to “Kate-mania,” auctioneer Kerry Taylor estimated an asking price of between $14,000 and $16,000. In the end, an anonymous buyer snapped it up for a whopping $125,000.
The sheer dress that “caught a prince” ended up fetching a princely sum and remains a key piece of Kate’s romance with William.