Is Kate auditioning to be the catalogue queen? Duchess is a Vogue cover star...

Is Kate auditioning to be the catalogue queen? Duchess is a Vogue cover star...but LIZ JONES dares to say it's all a bit Boden. Months in the planning. Shrouded in secrecy. The most talented people in the fashion industry corralled for the Duchess of Cambridge’s first magazine shoot. And what a result: the return of the Sloane Ranger in a field in Norfolk. It is all a far cry from Diana’s seminal Vogue images shot by Patrick Demarchelier in 1991. They transformed her from a Sloane with too much puppy fat and a fondness for heavy jewellery (as in her first posed Vogue cover in 1981) into a goddess: elfin, crop-haired, mischievous, confident. This is what a Vogue cover should look like. It is too rural, too hunting, shooting and fishing, when we were waiting for something red carpet. A Princess. Vogue editor Alex Shulman says the shoot is ‘a fitting tribute to a young woman whose interest in both photography and the countryside is well known’. The countryside! This a woman whose natural habitat was once the Kings Road, and the inside of Reiss! The cover is shot by Josh Olins, who transformed Emma Watson from schoolgirl to dishevelled slut last year. But the photo on this cover is so wholesome and toothy, it could almost be on the front of American Vogue (whose editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, must be spitting tacks she was pipped to the post). It’s hard to blame Vogue, as I can’t imagine Kate was easy to handle. I am happy she vetoed Mario Testino (too Hollywood) and Demarchelier (too airbrushed; I’m super glad that in a portrait inside you can see Kate’s wrinkles). But she has baulked at looking in any way sexy or modern. She has also refused to give up her heavy Scouse brow, not toning down the black make-up that’s more Katie Price than Kate Windsor. Kate would also have called the shots when it came to clothes, not wanting to expose too much skin, fearing she would look too thin. Kate also didn’t want to look too ‘designer’. So instead, for one of the new photos, she has opted for a Petit Bateau Breton top in what can only be called mauve – a pose described by Shulman as ‘beautiful’, but that I can only describe as ‘Boden’. What can I say? The Norfolk countryside looks gorgeous, if chilly. I’m sure someone from Vogue power-washed the Duchess’s Land Rover Defender (we got an ambivalent ‘no comment’ when we asked Kensington Palace if there is any deal with Land Rover and the Royals). It is all a bit safe, a bit reverential, a bit Wellington boot room. But here is my important problem. You only grace the cover of Vogue when you want to become an icon and have your ego massaged. You are joining the fashion elite. Like Diana, who wanted to be a mother, a Princess, a charity worker, an everywoman, a pin-up, Kate has sold her soul to the devil that is vanity and elitism, and those fashionistas who judge others only by their BMI.Kate, who up to now has protected her privacy and that of her children ferociously, has opened the floodgates to the sort of forensic scrutiny her late mother-in-law endured. There is no going back. Pandora’s dressing-up box has burst open.