Yo, can I get a deep dive on royals and tights? I notice Meghan was in ivory-tinged nylons for her first engagement of married life in May, with the temperature showing 22C. What’s going on?

Marina, west London

Requested deep dive completed. You are not alone, Marina of west London, in noticing the awful beige tights Meghan wore last week. They immediately became the most talked about fashion item of the month, gazumping Meghan’s wedding dress. Think of it as that ubiquitous “distracted boyfriend” meme, in which a man eyes up some woman to the disgust of his girlfriend. Us = the man. New woman = Meghan’s new tights. Girlfriend = Meghan’s wedding dress. Really, who needs columns any more when we can all just communicate in memes?

Anyway, these tights were shocking for two reasons: first, Meghan had heretofore, like all good Cali girls, always gone bare-legged and, two, they were “flesh coloured” but not the colour of her actual flesh. Perhaps a courtier saw her coming down the hall, spotted those unacceptably naked legs, ran into Beatrice or Kate’s room, rooted through their laundry basket and pulled out the first pair of half-clean tights they found. Remember how we were all so excited two weeks ago that a mixed-race woman marrying into the royals proved the Windsors were finally shaking off their racist not-too-distant past? Well, there were always going to be bumps on their journey to the present day, I guess.

Meghan in ‘those tights’. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

But even leaving aside the colour of the tights, there are the tights themselves. You know how all those British romcoms about love across the Atlantic go, with American women bringing their Americanness to British men, teaching them to be open about their feelings and to stop only hanging out with people they went to school with? Well, that is not the way this story is going to play out. Meghan’s new coat of arms may be “California-inspired” with its blue background (like the ocean, see) and yellow lines (like the sun, see) but that is as far as the House of Windsor is going to go in accommodating Meghan’s individuality: she isn’t bringing her plucky Americanness to them; they are forcing their flesh tights Windsorness on her. (Incidentally, my absolutely favourite headline about the Duchess of Sussex’s new coat of arms was: “Will Meghan Markle’s new California-inspired coat of arms convince millennials to embrace traditional heraldry?” Tl;dr, no!)

Bad tights and the Windsors go together like the older royals and blackamoor brooches: long after everyone else consigned them to the dustbin of shame, the royals consider them the crucial finishing touch. Diana wore some terrible tights – including shiny beige ones for her famous solo photocall in front of the Taj Mahal. Proving Windsors never change, they just interchange: Kate, Beatrice and Eugenie also go for beige ones and sheer black ones, looks favoured by no one in the 21st century outside the home counties, and the London postcodes SW1, SW3, SW6 and W8.

Must female Windsor legs be covered in case they excite too much male excitement, like the apocryphal table legs in the Victorian era? And are beige ones the new uniform?

“No, it is not true!” one royal expert recently insisted in an American fashion magazine. Well, thank God for that.

“They are at liberty to choose whatever colour tights they wish!” Oh. “I think the only reason they have chosen ‘nude’ in recent years is because they have become so much more fashionable, and the ‘bare legs’ look became the craze.”

Well, I don’t know if I would have called it a “craze”, but it’s good to know that “the ‘bare legs’ look” is allowed, even if bare legs aren’t. I was intrigued about how things would pan out for Meghan, fashion-wise. It was easy to see the future with Harry’s previous girlfriends: if he had married Chelsy Davy it would have been an Andy and Fergie re-run; Harry and Cressida Bonas looked like a Charles and Diana repeat (again, just in the fashion sense). But how would a California actor emerge from the Windsor meat grinder, which has chewed up so many women before her? We’re still in the early days, of course, but the beige tights are a deeply ominous sign. You know that famous saying: if eyes are the window to a woman’s soul, then bad tights are the awful curtains that your in-laws make you hang, ruining your trendy new loft extension.