Queen Mary continues her reign as a royal with an eye to history, wearing Queen Alexandrine’s sapphire tiara for the first time at the Vietnamese state banquet on Monday evening.
The stunning jewels inside the sapphire and diamond tiara were a wedding gift to Queen Alexandrine from Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia upon her marriage in 1898.
Queen Alexandrine became queen consort of Denmark in 1912 and was never photographed wearing the tiara, but she did wear sapphire pieces as earrings and brooches. In 1933, when her younger son Prince Knud married Princess Caroline-Mathilde, she gifted the tiara to her new daughter-in-law.
Foto: Kongehuset ©
Princess Caroline-Mathilde was a would-be queen consort of Denmark, and would have ascended alongside her husband had the laws of succession not changed in 1953 to permit Queen Margrethe and her sisters succession rights.
While she never became queen, Princess Caroline-Mathilde kept herself adorned in Queen Alexandrine’s sapphire tiara. She would modify it in the 1960s and upon her death in 1972, bequeathed it to her younger son, Count Christian, gifted it to his wife, Countess Anne, on her 50th birthday. She continued to wear the tiara until her death in 2014.
Countess Anne’s daughters jointly inherited the tiara and later sold it at auction in 2018. Afterwards, it was displayed, on loan from a private owner, at the Amalienborg Palace Museum until 2024, when the Danish Royal Collection acquired it.
The Danish Royal Court issued a press release on Monday stating that Queen Mary collaborated with jewellery designers Diana Holstein and Hanan Emquies to “give the piece of jewellery a new, fully reversible design…that respects the piece’s history and special tradition” while being wearable nearly 130 years later.
Queen Mary now has the option to wear Queen Alexandrine’s sapphire tiara in its present state, as a necklace or as a brooch.
This isn’t the first time Queen Mary has dipped into the history of the Danish Royal Family for her tiaras.
In Finland last year, she wore Queen Caroline Amalie’s gold bandeau tiara, which hadn’t been worn in over 150 years. In 2024, at the end of her first year as queen consort, she commissioned a new tiara from rose-cut diamonds that were first used in the 1800s.
