There is a princess in all our heads. She must be destroyed. As the press continues to glut itself on the Cult of Kate Middleton, businesses are cashing in on young women’s insatiable lust for princess paraphernalia: fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry a prince.
This saccharine tide of glittery pink kitsch began in the mid-1980s, amplifying a harmless daydream into a terrifying collective hallucination of good behaviour rewarded with royal privilege. Since Disney launched its Princess product line in 2000, aiming to get “three or four” pieces of spangly tat into every girl’s bedroom, the tide has become a tsunami. Disney Princess is now worth £4bn, the largest girl’s franchise in the world, and the fairytale doesn’t stop with little girls: adult women, too, are playing dress-up, holding princess makeover parties and flocking to see Diana’s wedding gown as it tours America, as serious female writers devote endless speculative column inches to the minutiae of Middleton’s post-nuptial experience. Have we all gone mad?
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