Even before she gained royal access to the world’s best stylists and designers, Meghan Markle was known for her fashion-forward style choices. And now that she’s the Duchess of Sussex, she’s putting her sharp eye and skillful design sense to good use.
In her editors’ letter for the September issue of British Vogue, which the duchess guest-edited, she wrote about her new partnership with Smart Works. She’s designing a capsule workwear clothing collection to benefit the organization, which provides both job coaching and clothing to unemployed women.
The collection will be sold on a “one-to-one basis,” royal commentator Omid Scobie reported. In other words, for every item sold, one will be donated to Smart Works.
“Not only does this allow us to be part of each other’s story, it reminds us we are in it together,” Meghan wrote in the issue, which will be available in stores and online on Friday.
We don’t know yet if her collection will be available in Canada. It will be sold later this year at the British department stores Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, the shop Jigsaw, and through the designer Misha Nonoo, a friend of Meghan’s.
Jigsaw doesn’t deliver to Canada, but the other three outlets do. A representative from Misha Nonoo told HuffPost Canada that they can’t discuss the collection yet, but that they’ll release a statement in the fall. John Lewis and Marks & Spencer also declined to comment.
Smart Works is one of Meghan’s royal patronages. She visited their London offices in January, where she picked out clothing with one of the group’s clients.
“The reason why I was drawn to Smart Works is that it reframed the idea of charity as community,” she wrote in Vogue, according to the Daily Mail. “It’s a network of women supporting and empowering other women in their professional pursuits.”
This isn’t her first foray into clothing design. In the spring of 2016, she designed a similar collection for the Canadian brand Reitmans. It was meant to be a more affordable version of the clothing her character wore on “Suits,” she said.
“Often, women come up to me and say ‘Oh, I love that skirt you were wearing on that episode last week. Who was it by?’ And then you see this crestfallen look on their face when I tell them it’s a $5,000 Tom Ford skirt. Who in the world is going to buy that?” she said at the time.
Several of the items she designed are still viewable on the website, although, of course, they sold out long ago. And she detailed the partnership on her dearly departed lifestyle website The Tig, some of which was preserved by fashion sites like Meghan’s mirror.
And, memorably, she appeared in their self-aware ad campaign, which highlighted the fact that people were unlikely to believe her stylish clothing really came from Reitmans.
We’ll update this story if we hear back about her new line’s Canadian availability. Really.