Why Markle’s influencer era is the riposte to the royal family

Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

Is your new year’s resolution all about scaling back your social media habit? The Duchess of Sussex, it seems, will be taking the opposite approach in 2025. On 1 January, Meghan unveiled a brand new Instagram account, complete with a straightforward but somehow slightly grandiose mononymic username, @meghan.

And in doing so, she appeared to inaugurate the next stage in her post-royal career. Welcome to Meghan Markle’s influencer era, which will see the Duchess taking us behind the scenes of her Montecito life, not just on social media but also with a glossy Netflix show that will “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming”.

Her debut post, on her first personal account in six years, was a brief, ever-so-casual video clip, which we can probably assume was workshopped by a whole load of social media experts throughout the last quarter of 2024 (an Instagram launch is no trivial matter). It shows Meghan with her luxuriant hair flowing, clad in a loose white shirt and light jeans. She jogs barefoot towards the sea with all the joie de vivre of a quirky romcom heroine in an uplifting montage sequence, but stops short of the water.

Then she bends down to write “2025” in the sand with her finger, a moment of perfectly rehearsed spontaneity; she grins, before jogging off once more.

If this seems like a relatively low-key way to announce a big Instagram comeback, that’s entirely the point. Meghan is a savvy enough operator to know that on social media, authenticity (or at least, some curated, glossy version of authenticity) is king. This short video snippet feels worlds away from the more staid official “content” she’d have had to put out to the world had she and her husband Prince Harry remained part of the royal family: the photos of handshakes with dignitaries, the earnest to-camera addresses, the formal portraits... you know the drill. Instead, it says, or tries to say: “I’m like you, just with a designer wardrobe and better access to the California coastline.” It’s aspirational without being too much. A bit smug, but not so much as to alienate its viewers. It was a perfect way to roll out the red carpet for her big Netflix launch, giving us a hint of the sort of tone we can expect.

The duchess’s inevitable pivot to influencing makes a lot of sense. It comes after a long string of lacklustre ventures from the no-longer-royal couple. There was the foray into podcasting, then the parting of ways with audio giant Spotify. Prior to the announcement of With Love, Meghan’s launch, their much-vaunted Netflix deal had resulted in a hotly discussed tell-all documentary and a handful of projects that were far less warmly received.

Then came the protracted launch of Meghan’s lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard, which seemed to boil down to an(other) Instagram launch, a few jars of strawberry jam being sent out to famous friends, then radio silence.

In December, the American site The Cut, which Meghan previously selected to publish one of her first big post-Megxit interviews in 2022, bluntly declared that “Harry and Meghan’s projects can’t stop flopping”.

In other words, it was about time Meghan shifted gear, ideally to a field in which she already had a strong track record. Her two main options, then, were acting and social media. Acting feels out of the question thanks to her outsize fame: she is now far too recognisable to disappear into a role. The latter, meanwhile, moves faster, is more reliable, consistent and, let’s face it, has far fewer gatekeepers and presents fewer obstacles to success. It also goes hand in hand with the sort of upmarket lifestyle-based reality-ish show that she is set to launch.

What is Meghan’s social media “track record”, you ask? Long before she met Prince Harry, back when she was “that woman off of Suits”, Meghan was a dedicated Instagrammer, not just on her own personal account but as a way of promoting her lifestyle blog, The Tig. The now-defunct website was described by the duchess as “a hub for the discerning palate — those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion and beauty”; it was shut down in April 2017, a sign that her relationship with Harry was serious.

My former life as a women’s magazine journalist circa 2016 to 2018 (ie the pinnacle of Markle’s royal-adjacent years) meant that I spent an inordinate amount of time looking back at both The Tig’s account and Markle’s personal Instagram profile in order to glean little nuggets of insight about Prince Harry’s new love. I can therefore attest that Meghan was very good at Instagram (or, perhaps more accurately, very good at fulfilling what we wanted from Instagrammers at the time). She had an eye for a motivational quote, a piece of grid-worthy feminist street art, or a striking tablescape. She loved taking pictures of her food and her holidays. She had a penchant for wearing what I can only describe as “blogger hats”.

When she started dating Harry, though, her posts dried up, and she shut the account down for good in January 2018, shortly after the couple announced their engagement; later, they posted Instagram updates under the handle @sussexroyal, but stopped using it in 2020 when they announced their decision to leave the royal family.