‘KATE Middleton is known for recycling her favourite looks,’ a national newspaper reported.

In other words, she occasionally wears the same thing twice.

The Queen does this too - sometimes donning a pre-worn coat or hat. Each time the fact is highlighted in the Press and she is regaled as ‘thrify’ or ‘frugal’ - words that should not be used to describe a person who simply dresses in an outfit she has worn before.

Kate hit the headlines last week for wearing a £1,350 ‘trusty’ lilac dress that she had previously worn in summer last year.

I would never use the word ‘trusty’ after just two outings. What did they expect - for it to show signs of wear? My ‘trusty’ garments have been, literally, worn to death. I am still wearing a skirt I bought in the 1980s. It’s a little worse for wear and full of iron-on patches, but it’s still in service. I must have worn it at least a million times. Now that’s ‘trusty’, and it was nowhere near that price.

But I digress. I am more fascinated by the idea that, most days, the Royals wear different clothes.

Where do they put them all? I know they live in large houses, but surely they have the same wardrobe/chest-of-drawers arrangements as the rest of us?

With so many clothes, I can only imagine the horror that faces people like Kate and Meghan Markle each day as they trawl through the mass of dresses, tops and coats for something to wear.

I don’t have anywhere near as many clothes, yet my things are all squashed up so tightly that when I wrestle something free loads of other garments spring off their hangers and fall out too.

Those horrible wire hangers are the worst, catching on everything - why I still have them I don’t know - and skirt hangers don’t do their job properly, so at the slightest movement, they work free and come tumbling down.

It’s such a jumbled mess that anything I drag out is so crumpled it needs ironing.

Unless they are using vast, specially excavated basements under their homes to store their clobber, the Royals must surely suffer the same wardrobe nightmares that we all go through - only 100 times worse. Their stuff must be squashed to oblivion.

It must be such a strain to have to dress differently every time you go out. Why don’t the Royals take a leaf out of the average British woman’s book - we wear just five outfits on a rarely-altering loop, research carried out for Oxfam revealed.

And just over half of men admit they never wear at least 30 per cent of the clothes they own.

Most women have only one pair of jeans, four T-shirts and three jumpers or cardigans that regularly make it out of the wardrobe, the poll shows. Seven in ten rely on the same dress for all special occasions. For work, they typically rotate the same four outfits, while men pick from just three.

The main reason for neglecting clothes is that they are uncomfortable or are the wrong size.

Some 73 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men admit to owning numerous items that don’t fit.

But at least we can have occasional clear outs, taking what we don’t want to charity shops.

I can’t see the Royals doing this.

And what about their sock and knicker drawers? Are they, like mine, a nightmare too, with tights twisted around bras and socks with missing partners? I bet they are. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in this department, Kate, Meghan & Co rebel, slob out, and wear the same stuff for weeks on end.