Today, the Duchess of Cambridge was spotted wearing a black dress with a white Peter Pan collar, which was said to come from Topshop. As always, the community at What Kate Wore were quick off the mark to identify the dress, and came out with a possible match: the contrast collar shift dress (now out of stock).

All of this went down while I was having new (faster) broadband installed. Yes, Kate decided to pop up literally at the exact moment I was disconnected! This left me frantically looking on my phone for updates and trying to load Topshop in order to check stock levels. Of course, my size was the only one unavailable when I initally checked, so I called my local Topshop, and managed to get through on the second attempt. Right when I finally got someone on the phone from the right department, I hear: “excuse me?” The engineer had finally finished and was waiting to show off his handiwork… Reluctantly, I say to the sales assistant “I’ll have to phone you back” and she replies “but this is TOPSHOP, it’s very hard to get hold of us!”. With my saddest little voice, I say “I’m sorry, I have to phone you back…” RAAAAAAH! (That bit was internal, don’t worry.)

After testing the broadband (exactly the same as far as I can tell), I managed to get someone on the phone from Topshop again (actually not as hard as the sales assistant would have you believe!) and asked them to reserve the dress in a 10. Then, I actually managed to get into town before they closed today (usually impossible for me as I don’t have a car!) to nab the last one. THE LAST ONE IN THE SHOP. Unfortunately, it has a bit of a makeup mark on the back of the collar, but I hope I can clean it off.

So, here you go – this dress hasn’t been identified as the exact one that Kate was wearing today, to be honest, the collar looks very slightly different to me, and the sleeves look a bit shorter on mine. But, what do you think? Same dress?

That’s the back view – the zipper does go all the way up, but I unzipped it slightly for some reason…

See the dress Kate was wearing today at The Daily Mail and What Kate Wore.

EDIT!

Okay, so when I first heard about this dress, I typed ‘contrast collar’ into the Topshop search engine, and found two dresses, one in their regular range, and one ‘tall’. There was a tall left in size 10, so I ordered that immediately, and then tracked down the ‘regular’ in the shop itself. To be honest, I did wonder whether Kate would have ordered the tall, because, well, she is tall – but it did seem in photos that her dress was pretty short – hitting well above the knee. However, after seeing a couple of mentions of people saying that she was wearing the tall version, I decided to see whether I could find any proof one way or another – and I think I have!

Here is the length of the hem of the Goat Redgrave coat, from their site:

Here is the length of the regular contrast collar dress from Topshop’s site:

I just measured my own, and it comes to around 84cm from shoulder to hem, so that seems accurate. So if the Redgrave coat is a minimum of 127.5cm in length, that means that the dress would need to be approximately the same for it to appear the way it does in photos – if you click the links above you’ll see that the dress and coat seem to be the same length. But the regular version is just 85cm long, so we need to check the tall version…

Darn! No length listed! I’ll have to measure when it arrives… but, I think it’s safe to say the regular version of this dress is just too short to have the right effect under the Redgrave coat…

Related articles

• Kate Middleton Wears A Topshop ‘Contrast Collar Dress’ And Crepe Goat ‘Redgrave’ Coat For A Charity Visit To Child Bereavement UK (graziadaily.co.uk)