Ra-ra, excitable, given to excessive displays of cheering? The Swiss people are decidedly not, as opposed to those effusive mama-mia-ing Italians across the border.
So perhaps it’s a little apples and oranges to compare the scenes that played out when Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex turned up at the UN in Geneva on Monday and those in Reggio Emilia when Kate, The Princess of Wales descended.
Two princesses, two Euro charity trips, two pantsuits, two very different causes – and two very different scenes playing out.
This week Meghan flew to Switzerland for the opening of the Lost Screen Memorial, a heartbreaking tribute to 50 children who lost their lives due to online harms, before the opening of the 79th World Health Organisation Assembly. Appearing in the Places Des Nations, the duchess, dressed sombre black, vigorously rang the alarm bell about what social media – the “relentless algorithms, exploitative engagement, and endless exposure to harmful content” – is doing to kids.
This is the same digital coalface that she and Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex have been chipping away at for years, talking about the psychological and emotional cost of social media ran rampant. (Even if it doesn’t quite philosophically gel with the duchess’ own high-sheen Insta-posting habit.)
But here’s the interesting bit – not the why, where of Meghan’s appearance or even who made her perfect black suit (Armani of course) but what was going on in the background of the shots.
Which is to say, nothing much. No mobs or hordes on hand to witness the Duchess of Sussex give a deeply moving speech. Outside the metal barriers around the Memorial, passers by appeared to be just going about their day, generally unfussed.
The Daily Beast and The Royalist’s Tom Sykes, who was in Geneva, reported that there were “sixty or seventy invited guests, with perhaps another fifty or sixty members of the public who had wandered in or stationed themselves at the edges. It was not embarrassing, but it was not, by any reasonable measure, a throng.”
Contrast that with the Kate-o-mania that overtook the Italian town of Reggio Emilia last week when the Princess of Wales turned up to learn about their unique approach to education, how they raise their kids and the finer points of cranking out tortellini. After 36 hours in the country, I doubt there was a nary a union jack to be had anywhere north of Rome.
More than 3000 people turned out to see Kate, some waiting up to five hours or having travelled from nearby cities or even having gotten up at 5am, according to the Telegraph. The shots show crowds hanging out of windows and a sea of iPhones borne aloft.
Such was the ciao-ciao-ciao fervour for la principessa that after she left one school, “many of the teachers started crying: the result, they said, of how much the royal visit meant to the small Italian city”, the Telegraph reported.
And as I said, this is a bit of an apple, orange situation, Meghan’s Geneva moment was one of sombre reflection in a country that is deeply emotionally constipated; Kate’s was about celebrating happy, healthy preschoolers, in a country where the people where passions run so high they would probably reinvade Carthage if someone briefly slagged off the calzone.
That is to say, Meghan and Kate’s outings are far from like for like, however both women have in 2026 made clear they are launching themselves into their Global Serious Pantsuit years.
Since February, Meghan has travelled to Jordan, Australia and now Switzerland in the name of public service and doing good in the world. (Well, and making a few smackaroonies in the case of her time in Oz.) The only question is, where next?
Ditto Kate. After all the flag-waving success of Italy, an aide told the Telegraph of her early years work “She’s taking it up a gear. This is a global mission.”
What happens, when King Charles’ daughters-in-law, are both intent on packing their passports and trying to make the world a better place?
Zoom further out and Meghan and Kate are arriving at this moment having taken fundamentally different paths, the duchess’ twistier and turnier than a Bhutanese mountain trek while princess’ has been straighter than a freshly concreted Swiss sidewalk.
Aside from the unforeseen pause caused by her cancer diagnosis and recovery, Kate has been plugging away and gradually ramping up her Early Years work for the better part of a decade. She’s read the reports, convened meetings and sat in more rooms with egg-heady academics and specialists than every member of the British royal family combined since the Norman Conquest question.
It’s essentially been one big swooshing upwards parabolic arc.
The Meghan story is a far more of a hurdy-gurdy one. Since moving to the US, the duchess has pretty much run out of fingers in different pies, from podcasting to docos to romcoms to jam to candles to bookmarks to wine to a children’s book to a backing a vegan latte brand to teaming up with Gloria Steinem to push for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to being an impact investor aligned with fintech asset manager Ethic, to most recently becoming involved in an AI shopping app.
On one hand, it just goes to show that no one ever just has to ploddingly be one thing if you don’t want to. Hats? Wear ‘em all while we all hum ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’! However on another hand, Meghan’s is a higgledy-piggledy brand story.
Since her brief working royal interlude, just 20 months between her glorious wedding to the Megxit dash to North America, Meghan’s narrative has had more dips, twists and turns than a Bold and the Beautiful plot line in sweeps week.
If in the next year the Duchess of Sussex joined a pro-am NASA mission, built her own LLM, and tried out for the US Olympic archery team, I doubt anyone would blink. Her appetite for risk and change is up there with the Queen Mother’s for putting a tenner on the 3 o’clock at Newmarket and scribbling in her Wallis Simpson burn book.
Whether Meghan’s varied, blended causes plus commerce career pays off, we will have to wait and see, the possible outcomes, extreme. That’s versus Kate’s measured, steady one, her cause-related path as locked as in Olympic luge, which will effect real change and be about as exciting to watch from the sidelines as beige paint drying.
That’s the difference, I suppose, between being a free-agent with a mortgage to meet and with being someone required to learn to love sitting on a lumpy throne. Long may both the British and American Serious Pantsuit Years Reign Over Us.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.