Princesses Beatrice And Eugenie On Keeping It Real

2018 is set to be a bumper year for British royalists: with two billion people having recently watched the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, Princess Eugenie of York will take the stage at St George's Chapel, in Windsor, in October, when she marries Jack Brooksbank.

The wedding is, in part, the reason why Princesses Eugenie and her sister Beatrice have agreed to a rare interview with Vogue, in the September 2018 issue. In a year of milestones (Beatrice turns 30 in August), the sisters felt it was the right time to share their experiences as twentysomething working women and members of the Royal family with fashion features editor Ellie Pithers.

“It’s hard to navigate situations like these because there is no precedent, there is no protocol,” Beatrice explained, on a sunny day in June at Royal Lodge, the sisters' childhood home in Windsor. “We are the first: we are young women trying to build careers and have personal lives, and we’re also princesses and doing all of this in the public eye.”

Indeed, Eugenie will need to channel her grandmother’s poise at her upcoming nuptials. “I’m not stressed at all,” she said, of her looming October 12 wedding date. “It’s very nerve-wracking because you want it to be perfect but then you realise that you’re going to be with the person you love forever and nothing else really matters.” In addition to compiling Pinterest boards of cakes, her wedding planning has been consumed by her mission to make her life plastic-free. “It’s been eye-opening,” she shares. “My whole house is anti-plastic now – and Jack and I want our wedding to be like that as well.”

With the spotlight on the young royals at an all-time high, the sisters admitted to occasionally feeling overwhelmed - especially when it comes to social media. Eugenie officially joined Instagram in March, but is not quite at ease posting pictures just yet. “It’s so easy to recoil when you see a perfect image, but it’s important that it’s real. We’re real,” she asserted.

Their coping mechanism is each other; the two are exceptionally close, although they did admit to the odd cross word. “One of the biggest fights we ever had was about a pair of Converse trainers,” Beatrice joked. “We have the same size feet and both of us had identical pairs. One pair got trashed and the other sister may have swapped them.”