Belgium recently had a royal wedding when Princess Maria Laura wed William Isvy in Brussels in September.
We are taking a look at the two main options for royal wedding tiaras that the Princess had on her wedding day.
Queen Elisabeth’s Diamond Bandeau Tiara
It was heavily thought that Maria Laura would wear the Queen Elisabeth Diamond Bandeau Tiara on her wedding day. Unfortunately, Belgium doesn’t have many tiara options, and a few of the larger pieces are reserved for queens. That being said, the Queen Elisabeth Diamond Bandeau Tiara has been worn by several Belgian brides recently, including Queen Mathilde and Maria Laura’s sister-in-law, Princess Elisabetta.
The Queen Elisabeth Diamond Bandeau Tiara is named after its first owner, who was queen consort of Belgium from 1909 to 1934 as the wife of King Albert I. The design features a series of interlocking Art Deco-inspired shapes (that can almost be viewed as creating the letter ‘E’ for Elisabeth) in a smaller setting that lends the tiara to convert to a choker or a necklace depending on the wearer’s style.
The tiara made its way down a line of queens, reportedly given to Queen Astrid (wife of King Leopold III) by her mother-in-law as a gift for delivering her third child: the future King Albert II. After Astrid’s tragically early death, the tiara was worn infrequently by Lillian, Leopold’s second wife. Albert later inherited the tiara, which became Queen Paola’s go-to tiara while she was still the Princess of Liège and even after becoming queen consort in 1993.
When her son Philippe married Mathilde in 1999, Queen Paola lent the Queen Elisabeth Diamond Bandeau Tiara to the future queen; in 2014, she lent it to her new granddaughter-in-law, Elisabetta, for her wedding to Prince Amedeo. Princess Astrid also wore the tiara on a state visit to Germany.
The Savoy-Aosta Tiara
Maria Laura opted to honour her father’s royal line by wearing the Savoy-Aosta Tiara, a diamond floral scroll tiara that dates back to the Italian Royal Family. It is almost exclusively worn by Princess Astrid in public, though the Belgian Princess doesn’t usually find herself in tiara situations.
First owned by Princess Anne of Orléans, a French princess, the tiara made its way through the Italian Royal Family and was worn at the weddings of King Baudouin in 1960 and King Juan Carlos in 1962. Princess Anne’s daughter, Margherita, married Archduke Robert, a son of the last Austria-Hungarian Emperor. Their son is Prince Lorenz, Maria Laura’s father.
