Meghan Markle Joins The 2016 Nostalgia Trend With Her Own Romantic Throwback

What does your 2016 throwback look like? People have been posting pictures from the club, and of their skinny jeans and millennial pink-forward outfits. Pop culture was swept up by Beyoncé’s Lemonade and La La Land. Creative directors like Alessandro Michele at Gucci, Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent and Phoebe Philo at Celine ruled. Got whiplash? For Meghan Markle, it was an altogether different life too.

The Duchess of Sussex has joined in on the nostalgic social media trend by posting her own throwback to Instagram. In a carousel dropped yesterday (January 16), Meghan shared a black and white video from the present day, where we see her dancing on a lawn with her husband, Prince Harry. The caption revealed that the clip was filmed by their four-year-old daughter, Princess Lilibet.

The second post in the carousel is an image of the couple in 2016, which looks like it was taken on their trip to Botswana that year, and which was also their third date. The couple embrace, knee-deep in water and surrounded by grasslands.

“When 2026 feels just like 2016… you had to be there,” Meghan wrote.

Of course, 2016 was the year that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry first met, after being set up on a blind date by mutual friends in early July. The couple went on to secretly date for about six months before their relationship became public. In an interview with Vanity Fair around the time of their engagement, Harry shared that he invited Meghan on this Botswana trip later that summer after they had been dating around London. “We camped out with each other under the stars,” he recalled. “She came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. So then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to know each other.” It was on the trip, he said, that he knew she was his “soulmate”.

“I was astonished that she said yes,” Harry said when thinking back on the date during the filming of their Harry & Meghan docuseries. “This woman, that I’ve really met twice… she’s coming to Botswana, and we’re gonna be living in a tent for five days!”