The first Monday in May is the most dazzling night in the fashion calendar, when the most wealthy, famous and influential people gather for the Met Gala in New York.

The event on Monday will be chaired by Vogue boss Anna Wintour – who has been in charge of it for more than 30 years – alongside tennis player Venus Williams, actress Nicole Kidman and singer Beyonce.

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos are the sponsors.

Not attending? The Duke and Duchess of Sussex – yet again.

Even though Meghan has plenty of fashion ambitions and pretensions – and, as we shall see, fashion is one of the revenue streams which she is hoping will help fund their lifestyle – the pair have once more failed to secure an invitation.

The Montecito duo were also, unsurprisingly, absent from all events during King Charles’s state visit to the US this week.

As if to further underline their persona-non-grata status, even Prince Harry’s boyhood friend Guy Pelly was at a White House garden party with his wife this week – yes, the same teenage tearaway who was by Harry’s side when he notoriously dressed up as a Nazi.

President Trump only reinforced the Sussexes’ unpopularity when he remarked to my colleague Robert Hardman that Harry had done ‘too many things’ to come back to the fold of his family, adding: ‘That wife of his. Boy, what she’s done to that guy.’

And yet – and it feels as inevitable as a tolling bell – the Sussexes still found a way to insert themselves into the media discourse this week.

A cover story in People magazine, long their favoured media outlet, came out on Wednesday, reflecting on their quasi-royal tour of Australia where they met sick children at a hospital and survivors of the Bondi Beach terror attack while also racking up nakedly commercial speaking engagements. According to the magazine, the trip is being hailed as the blueprint for the couple’s new working model.

The article was seen by many as a full-throated defence of their right to defy the Sandringham Summit by being half in and half out of the monarchy.

‘Making their own rules,’ ran the admiring headline. But to what end?

For it’s all too apparent that the Sussexes no longer have the help of the powerful and influential protectors who could unlock a life of commercial plenty.

Speaking to sources in California, the story told is one of wall-to-wall fall-outs and alienation.

Put simply, it means in the circles that matter, Meghan and Harry no longer have any bridges left to burn.

One source says: ‘They have truly lost the plot. I hear she’s spiralling badly because she knows nothing is working. The whole thing about her [As Ever] stuff selling out isn’t true any more. I don’t think either of them are happy.’

The source tells me they believe the couple’s problems are worse than many suspect because of Meghan and Harry’s unfortunate habit of falling out with the very people who could help them make a go of things financially.

One of the prime figures in this list is Anna Wintour, who attended a charity gala with Charles and Camilla in New York on Wednesday.

The source says Dame Anna turned against Meghan in 2019 when she collaborated with then British Vogue editor Edward Enninful on a ‘Forces for Change’ issue of the magazine.

There existed a long-time rivalry between Dame Anna at US Vogue, and Enninful at British Vogue, and Meghan picked her side – unwisely, as it turns out. Enninful is no longer the editor of British Vogue. Wintour has stepped aside from day-to-day editing US Vogue but remains Global Editorial Director and Chief Content Officer at Conde Nast, and seems more powerful than ever.

‘Meghan pledged her allegiance to Enninful which p***ed off Anna,’ says the source, adding: ‘Anna hates her. Meghan doesn’t want to pay, and never returns things.

‘Also, Anna loves the Royal Family. She is a Dame. Anna would have hated how they [the Sussexes] handled their exit from The Firm.’

Worryingly for Meghan, the famously icy Wintour apparently never forgives or forgets. So even though Meghan’s friendship with Enninful is also at an end – for reasons which are still unclear – there seems no way for Meghan to return to Anna’s good graces.

This is most unfortunate as there’s nobody more influential in fashion than Wintour.

Meghan’s attempts to insert herself into the high fashion narrative, by attending the Balenciaga show in Paris last year for instance, has notably not resulted in any commercial endorsements. Cringingly, Balenciaga designer Pierpaolo Piccioli let slip afterwards the embarrassing truth when he said the Duchess rang up and asked if she could come to his show.

For a self-confessed fashionista like Meghan, becoming an ambassador for Chanel, Dior or another major fashion house would be a dream come true – and a wonderful stream of revenue.

But Wintour is the kingmaker in this realm and without her patronage it remains out of reach.

The best Meghan could do was a cover of the less prestigious Harper’s Bazaar magazine in November 2025, which turned out to be a curiously fumbled chance – she barely plugged her As Ever jams and instead spoke about pursuing a career which felt ‘authentic’ to her and her pursuit of ‘fun’ over perfection.

It could, of course, have been very different for Meghan, because even Anna Wintour is not above flattery.

Consider how she has been carefully cultivated by Lauren Sanchez Bezos.

Married to one of the world’s richest men, Sanchez Bezos was happy to bend the knee to Anna, and accepted Wintour’s suggestion that she should be dressed for the Met Gala last year by Oscar de la Renta.

A source suggests Meghan has failed to make a potentially useful friend here, too.

‘She snubbed Lauren before the [Bezos] wedding. Meghan was invited to things by Lauren and didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to be seen with her because she thought she was trashy.’

Other powerful figures offended by Meghan are the Kardashians, who are also close to Lauren. The family’s matriarch Kris Jenner had her 70th birthday party at the Bezos house in LA in November last year. The party happened to fall on the eve of Remembrance Sunday, and was attended by Meghan and Harry, as the Royal Family gathered at the Albert Hall for the annual Festival of Remembrance.

Surprise was expressed by some that the Sussexes would party on such a solemn landmark. A row then blew up over pictures of them posted on social media by Jenner but later removed, apparently after a request by the Sussexes. The Sussexes denied they had asked for them to come down; Jenner’s daughter Kim Kardashian said the opposite was true.

As a result, says a source, the Kardashians have also had enough of Harry and Meghan: ‘The Kardashians are over them.’

If you are trying to make a lifestyle business fly on social media, it would be useful to be friends with the most followed people on the planet. But Kris Jenner hasn’t liked a single post on Meghan’s Instagram pages since last year.

And so, without the mutually beneficial relationships celebrities rely on, the Sussexes have been left to find other ways to maintain their profile, as they did this week.

On Thursday, as the US royal love-in continued for Charles and Camilla, an anodyne interview with Meghan (about her taste in clothes and ‘love’ for Australia and the Australians) was published in Australian Women’s Weekly.

She also reshared a message on her Instagram account captioned ‘Taurus, Leo, Scorpio & Aquarius ending the hardest seven years of their lives on April 25th’.

The post has been interpreted by many as a dig at the Royal Family, as seven years ago, in 2019, Meghan was settling into life as a working royal alongside Prince Harry. Megxit came the following year. Six years on, the couple are no closer to finding the long-term answer to their economic survival.

Meghan’s new big idea is making money by funnelling buyers towards the designers of her tour clothes via the website OneOff. For every sale, it nets her a slice of ten per cent of the value of the clothes she has worn.

Some believe the couple are now planning a similar tour in Africa.

More of this is likely in July, when Harry is due to attend a launch event for the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham.

It all feels murky because the couple’s activities are still being carried out with an implicit and explicit ‘Royal’ imprimatur.

In Ukraine on April 24, Harry was asked if he recognised the phrase ‘not a working royal’ and he replied: ‘No. I will always be part of the Royal Family and I am here working, doing the very thing I was born to do and I enjoy doing it.’

A ‘source close to Harry’ tells People magazine this is perfectly fine. ‘This idea he’s going against the wishes of the [late] Queen by being half in, half out is nonsense. None of this is being done in the name of the institution.’

He is then royal, and working, so a working royal… but at the same time he is not representing the Royal Family in that work, so nobody is allowed to object.

There is a sense he is tap dancing along a narrow semantic beam, living a ‘life of service’ and making a buck at the same time.

Just last week, Meghan was flogging her US Mother’s Day offerings on her ‘As Ever’ social channels, which include a small box of chocolate caramels, ferociously priced at $58 for ten tiny squares. Her Mother’s Day candles cost a similarly premium $64.

Her plugging clearly flew a little too close to the line of monetising their royal status, as a reference to ‘Prince Archie of Sussex’ and ‘Princess Lilibet of Sussex’ disappeared from promotional materials relating her Mother’s Day candles within a few hours.

People magazine was told, more than a year after its launch, that the As Ever business ‘is still in test-and-learn mode. [Meghan] wakes up thinking about new ideas and works on it all the time’.

For all the talk of ‘test mode’, though, the path appears to be set – ‘working royal’ engagements plus commercial ventures which will lean on their status.

One associate says: ‘They don’t have a choice at this point. They really need the money.’

The couple’s expenses are huge: that Montecito mansion, taxes and upkeep, security and travel, with some estimates reckoning they need to clear $5 million a year just to keep going.

Meghan is thought to have turned down deals to be the face of a capsule range at middle-middle fashion brands (I’m told American label J. Crew was interested). One wonders whether she can keep up this resistance to ‘lesser’ brands with bills to pay. It’s hard to see her current collaboration with OneOff amounting to much.

Of course, the most spectacular professional immolation for the Sussexes has come in the sphere of TV and film production, where Netflix has gone from being ‘all in’ six years ago, to ‘done’ now.

The deep-pocketed streamer walked away from a deal to back Meghan’s As Ever business earlier this year. Boss Ted Sarandos was even said to have joked that he didn’t want to talk to Meghan without a lawyer present.

To be fair to Sarandos, he tried to help Meghan and Harry save face when he invited them to an event to launch the second season of the prestige drama Beef in April.

Yet again, though, it all went wrong. Pictures of the couple were removed by Getty Images 24 hours after being published, even though Netflix had okayed them all.

The theory is Meghan didn’t like the way she appeared to be ‘clinging’ to Sarandos’s wife, Nicole Avant. My source is blunt about what is going on: ‘Nicole [Avant] hates her. So does Bela [Bajaria, a key Netflix executive] and Ted.’

As to why, it’s said Netflix came to understand the Sussex team were ‘briefing against one of their executives’, although it’s not clear if that was on anyone’s orders.

A source says: ‘Unless someone is of use to them with money or unwavering attention then [the Sussexes] always fall out with them. They are worse at dealing with people than they are with business. And that’s saying a lot.’