Sarah Ferguson appears to be sending a subtle but direct message through her shoes at a book signing event for her 2021 novel, Her Heart for a Compass, in London this week. Her dark blue velvet loafers were embroidered with the royal family’s unofficial motto, “Never complain, never explain.”
However, the Duchess of York’s shoes aren’t new. People notes that Ferguson wore them previously in 2022 for a night out in London. “There has been a long tradition in the British royal family of riding criticism out and keeping your head down and taking the long view,” royal biographer Penny Junor previously told the magazine. “Crises come and go, and people get criticized—often for five minutes by the media, who then move on.”
Ferguson appears to be making a sartorial statement just as a new royal biography is about to be published. Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie is poised to be a bombshell when it drops on August 14, with numerous outlets already publishing explosive claims made in the book. It reportedly paints a damning picture of Prince Andrew, depicting him as arrogant, unfaithful, and vulgar, and detailing multiple alleged instances of him being unkind to staff.
Lownie is a seasoned biographer with previous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He is no stranger to fighting legal battles, having launched a case to get Mountbattens’ diaries and correspondence made public.
Last weekend, the new royal book was serialized in the Daily Mail. However, the serialization attracted attention for a different reason after Prince Harry’s team spoke out to deny a story in it. “I can confirm Prince Harry and Prince Andrew have never had a physical fight, nor did Prince Andrew ever make the comments he is alleged to have made about the Duchess of Sussex to Prince Harry,” a spokesperson for Prince Harry told T&C. The denial is in relation to content from the book, adapted for publication in the newspaper, which claimed that Harry and Andrew had a physical fight during a family gathering in 2013.
Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at .
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