A dark veil and a wide pale brim stand out in this old photo from the races. The women under the hats are Lady Amelia and Lady Eliza Spencer. They’re often introduced as Princess Diana’s nieces. Ask them about growing up, though, and you’re as likely to hear about Cape Town as England.
You can spot their father in the bookshop photo, standing next to a Christmas tree. Charles Spencer is Diana’s younger brother. He and Victoria Lockwood had four children together. Kitty is the eldest, then come the twins, and Louis is the youngest. Princes William and Harry are the twins’ first cousins.
Amelia and Eliza were born in Britain in July 1992. They spent their first three years at Althorp in Northamptonshire, where their father had grown up. The family moved to South Africa in 1995. The girls grew up in Constantia, a suburb of Cape Town, and spent school holidays with their father back at Althorp.
In their Tatler interview, Eliza remembered being put on the same sports teams as Amelia at Reddam House. That meant swimming, netball, tennis and sometimes water polo. There’s a view of the playing fields in this gallery. The school was close to their home in Constantia.
Diana visited the family in Cape Town. Eliza remembered a day at Noordhoek beach when a photographer came up to them. Diana turned the walk back into a race to see who could reach the car first. Eliza didn’t realize what her aunt was doing until later. The girls were five when Diana died in 1997.
The Sisters in Fashion
The group picture has three people squeezed together, with heads and shoulders still visible behind them. Eliza put it on Instagram. The sisters moved to London in 2021. When W caught up with them four years later, the twins were on a set talking about their new Aspinal of London campaign.
Look on Storm Management's model roster and you’ll find a portfolio for each twin. They shared a Tatler cover in 2021. For the March 2025 issue, Kitty came along too. All three wore Balenciaga. They’d never done a magazine cover as a trio before.
If you saw the sisters at their 2026 Vanity Fair interview, you’d have seen two matching Burberry trench coats. The dark outfits in this photograph have more differences. Look at the necklines. One sits high and the other is open. In W, Eliza described a third look, the one she goes back to on days off. Jeans and a shirt will do.
There are two weddings to keep straight here. Amelia and Eliza both went to William and Catherine’s in 2011. The picture in Windsor comes from Harry and Meghan’s wedding seven years later. Tatler describes Amelia walking to the chapel arm in arm with her mother, Victoria Lockwood, and her siblings Kitty and Louis.
Amelia's Wedding and Eliza's Plans
Amelia went back to South Africa for her own wedding. She married Greg Mallett in Stellenbosch in March 2023. They’d met at the University of Cape Town. Amelia took Eliza with her to Milan to see Donatella Versace about the dress. Eliza had a job on the wedding day itself. She was one of the siblings who gave a speech at the reception.
Channing Millerd proposed to Eliza in Santorini in July 2025. When Eliza spoke to Hello! on October 9, 2026, they were still looking at wedding venues in Italy. They already had a business together by then. Their Provence rosé, Lala V, had gone on sale in Britain that summer. Eliza told the magazine the first part of the name came from what her younger half-brother Samuel called her as a child.
At Cannes in 2025, the sisters wore two versions of the same gown. One was black, the other white. They told W about the matching dresses after the festival. Both went back to Cannes in 2026, and Vanity Fair covered their arrival for the screening of Coward.
That’s Prince William with Tom Cruise in the last photograph. It comes from a London Air Ambulance Charity gala in 2024. That year brought some news for the twins themselves. They’d been told they were fraternal. As they later explained to W, a genetic test in 2024 confirmed they’re identical.
