Kate Middleton's see-through dress for sale!

Another royal embarrassment!

This week the UK tabs are tittering over the fact that Kate Middleton’s see-through dress – the one she famously modeled at a university fashion show for an audience that included a suddenly smitten Prince William – is set to be auctioned off to the highest bidder next month. It will go on the block at La Galleria on Pall Mall and is expected to sell for up to £10,000.

The strapless, transparent-lace skirt which Kate, then age 20, daringly wore as a dress with nothing underneath except a bra and knickers (as they call them over here) has since become as iconic as the thin cotton skirt her late would-be mother-in-law, Lady Diana Spencer, accidentally let herself be photographed in sans slip, just weeks after her own engagement.

The designer, Charlotte Todd, 31, who now works at an aquarium in Bristol, knitted the silk dress herself over a period of a week. Since that fateful night she had kept it stored away in the back of a wardrobe because she “had a feeling” she should hang on to it.

“I don’t know whether Kate was given it to wear or whether she chose it. If it was her idea to wear it as a dress, she was very brave. I can’t imagine her doing it now – it would be frowned upon,” said Todd. “But I wonder whether she was trying to get his attention with it, whether she said, “I’ll have that, so that I can bag the Prince.”

I personally have no problem with present-or-future royals flaunting their figures (google Princess Diana in the famous Dodi-in-Sardinia-yacht-shots for more details), but I do wish for Kate’s sake she’d chosen to do it in something other than an ill-fitting piece of trendy tat. It’s not sexy or scandalous so much as downright unflattering. Having said that, the tabs over here will look for any excuse to run a photo of a scantily clad future princess.

As the Mail pointed out, “It was the first – and, no doubt, last - time we had a glimpse of our future Queen in her underwear.” Quite.