The Court Jeweller

Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Queen Alia’s Cartier Tiara

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Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Alamy

It’s hard to find a more collectively glamorous group of royal women than the ladies of the Jordanian royal family. Today’s tiara, the Cartier tiara that belonged to the late Queen Alia, has been worn by three of the country’s queens and princesses.

Queen Alia of Jordan at Heathrow Airport, September 1973 (Gerrard/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Alia Baha Ad-Din Touqan was the third of the four wives of King Hussein of Jordan. (The first was Princess Dina; the second, Princess Muna, is the mother of the current king, Abdullah II; and the fourth is the American-born Queen Noor.) Alia was the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat and had lived and studied all over the world before marrying King Hussein in 1972.

CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP via Getty Images

The diamond Cartier tiara that Alia wore was given to her by the king. It’s reminiscent of a fringe tiara, but really the design is quite abstract and very modern, more linear than floral. (The Jordanian royals seem to favor this kind of contemporary design; Queen Noor also has a tiara that is similar to this one.) The tiara is also intriguing in that it has an exceptionally tall base, requiring serious tiara hair.

Queen Alia wears her tiara for a banquet during a Jordanian state visit to Japan, March 1976 (Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Alamy)

Just like her tiara, Alia was a rather modern Jordanian queen; she supported women’s suffrage and was a great supporter of children’s charities and the arts. Unfortunately, her tenure as queen consort was short. In February 1977, she died in a helicopter crash in Amman. To celebrate the late queen’s life, the country’s international airport was named for Alia — in fact, it’s one of only a few international airports named for a woman.

Princess Haya, November 2006 (STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images)

Alia’s only daughter, Princess Haya, inherited her mother’s tiara. (Here’s a 2017 portrait from Majesty Magazine which shows her wearing the tiara.) The Jordanian royal family doesn’t have a crown jewel collection, and all of their jewels are apparently personal property, generally handed down from mother to daughter rather than retained for the use of future queens.

Queen Rania wears Queen Alia’s tiara for a gala dinner at the Royal Palace in Madrid, October 1999 (CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP via Getty Images)

However, this tiara has been worn several times by a subsequent queen consort. Princess Haya loaned the tiara on various occasions to her sister-in-law, Queen Rania, shortly after she became queen. Rania even wore the tiara for her husband’s coronation in June 1999, linking Alia’s heirloom tiara with the next generation of Jordanian royals. Rania’s jewel collection has since grown to include other sparklers, but the tiara’s appearance at the coronation provided a lovely connection between the country’s past and its future.

Note: This is an updated version of an earlier post, with new text/images.

The Luxembourg Sapphire Bracelet Bandeau

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Mark Renders/Getty Images

Princess Margaretha of Liechtenstein is one of the rare European royals who is part of two different reigning families. Married to the brother of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Margaretha is also a sister of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Such a well-connected princess definitely needs a tiara or two, and today’s sparkler, the Luxembourg Sapphire Bracelet Bandeau, currently resides in her jewelry box.

Official Portrait/Grand Ducal Court of Luxembourg

The jewel originally belonged to Margaretha’s mother, the late Grand Duchess Josephine-Charlotte of Luxembourg. The sapphire and diamond bracelet was one of the presents she received when she married Hereditary Grand Duke Jean in 1953. Josephine-Charlotte was born a Belgian princess, and the bracelet was a gift from the Belgian nobility. The bracelet, made by Jean Lantonnois, is set with more than 200 diamond brilliants and a single Ceylon sapphire. Josephine-Charlotte wears the bracelet on her right wrist in the official portrait above (as well as her Sapphire Art Deco Necklace Tiara).

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The bracelet is marvelously convertible, which is always a good thing for a piece of royal jewelry. Josephine-Charlotte most often wore it as a bracelet, but she was also pictured wearing the central portion of the bracelet as a brooch. (Above, she uses it to secure her order sash.) She was also photographed wearing the bracelet as a bandeau-style tiara, as was her elder daughter, Princess Marie-Astrid.

Mark Renders/Getty Images

After Josephine-Charlotte’s death in 2005, the family decided to sell a large amount of her jewelry, including the sapphire bracelet, at auction. Though the sale was canceled following public outcry, many pieces were quietly sold afterward. But in 2007, the sapphire bracelet made a prominent public appearance on Josephine-Charlotte’s younger daughter, Princess Margaretha, suggesting that it had been spared from the auction block.

Mark Renders/Getty Images

Princess Margaretha wore the bracelet as a bandeau-style tiara for a state banquet at Laeken Castle in Belgium in March 2007. She was part of the Luxembourgish royal party visiting the Belgian royal family on that occasion. (Of course, the Belgian royals are also Margaretha’s aunts, uncles, and cousins, thanks to her mother’s Belgian royal heritage.)

Mark Renders/Getty Images

Margaretha paired the bandeau with diamond and sapphire earrings and diamond bracelets for the dinner. From this angle, you get a good idea of the design of the sides of the bracelet, as well as the way those sides attach to the central element.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

We haven’t seen Margaretha wear the bracelet in bandeau form since 2007, but in 2012, she made another prominent appearance in sapphires. For the wedding of her nephew, Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume, she used a diamond and sapphire brooch to secure her pale pink wrap. Many have speculated that the central sapphire and diamond cluster is the same one from the bracelet, just removed and reset into a new brooch design.

The Savoy-Aosta Tiara: An Updated Look

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Astrid wears the tiara for the pre-wedding gala in Luxembourg, 2012 (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Tiaras are special because they’re beautiful works of art, but some of them are doubly interesting because of their royal pasts. Every now and then, one of today’s princesses wears a tiara that came from a royal house of the past. Today’s tiara, the Savoy-Aosta Tiara, is one of those — it started off with a branch of the former reigning family of Italy, and now it graces the head of a Belgian princess.

Mark Renders/Getty Images

Although we mostly associate it with Italy, the tiara’s history traces back to a French princess, Anne of Orléans. She married her first cousin, Prince Amedeo of Savoy, in 1927. The tiara is an all-diamond piece, likely set in platinum; it features floral and scroll motifs in its design.

Anne wears the tiara, ca. 1920s (Wikimedia Commons)

The first images of Anne wearing the tiara show her using it 1920s style, wearing it low across her forehead as a bandeau. Amedeo became Duke of Aosta on his father’s death in 1931. He commanded the Italian forces in East Africa during World War II, and he died as a prisoner of war in Kenya in 1942. Because he and Anne had only daughters, the Aosta title passed to his younger brother, but the tiara stayed with the women of the family.

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Anne wore the tiara during the celebrations for the wedding of her eldest daughter, Princess Margherita, and Archduke Robert of Austria-Este (one of the sons of last rulers of Austria-Hungary, Emperor Karl I and Empress Zita) in 1953. Margherita later borrowed the tiara for another royal wedding: the nuptials of King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of Belgium in 1960. Margherita would eventually inherit the tiara from her mother — and she would also find herself further connected with the Belgian royals. Robert and Margherita’s son, Lorenz, married Princess Astrid of Belgium in 1984.

Astrid wears the tiara during the Hungarian state visit to Belgium, 2008 (Mark Renders/Getty Images)

Astrid is the only sister of King Philippe of the Belgians, and as such, she regularly attends white-tie events. But we’ve talked at length about the relative tiara poverty of the Belgian royals, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Astrid turned to her husband’s family to find a suitable sparkler. She has borrowed her mother’s art deco bandeau, but this is the only other tiara she’s worn in public.

Anna Therese of Arco-Zinneberg wears the tiara on her wedding day, October 2018 (Photo generously provided by Gabi; do not reproduce)

For years, Astrid has been the primary wearer of the tiara, and there was much speculation about whether or not Margherita had given it outright to her daughter-in-law. But in 2018, we got a much clearer picture of the tiara’s status, thanks to a family wedding. Anna Therese of Arco-Zinneberg, one of Margherita’s granddaughters, wore the tiara on her wedding day in Bavaria in October 2018. On that occasion, royal jewelry historian Vincent Meylan confirmed that Prince Lorenz had loaned the tiara to his niece for the day — which means that Margherita has indeed passed the tiara along to the next generation of the family, and we’ll surely be seeing Astrid wearing it for years to come.