The Danish Floral Aigrette

The Danish Floral Aigrette (Photo: KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Image)

It’s a little hard to classify this piece of jewelry, because it’s so many things at once: a tiara, a set of hair ornaments, a corsage ornament. Today, we’re discussing the diamond floral aigrette that belongs to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

Queen Margrethe wears the tiara (Photo: KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Image)

The complicated, all-diamond tiara was made in the 1950s.For years, it was speculated that it could be much older, perhaps a nineteenth-century piece from the collection of Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna of Russia, whose elder daughter, Alexandrine, was the queen consort of King Christian X of Denmark. The Danish Royal Collection confirmed that this speculation was incorrect in their Golden Jubilee publications in 2022.

 

Tiara detail (Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

The tiara breaks down into three sections. It’s a large piece, able to be worn as a nearly closed circlet. The various sections can be taken apart and worn separately. The central flower element of the middle section is mounted en tremblant, so it shimmers and moves slightly as the wearer moves.

 

Tiara detail (Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Before it was acquired by the Danish royals, the tiara was owned by a Danish-American tenor, Lauritz Melchior, who was famous for singing Wagnerian opera. His wife was photographed in the aigrette in the early 1960s. But in 1963, the Melchiors decided to part with the tiara.

 

The tiara was acquired next by King Frederik IX of Denmark. Frederik’s wife, Queen Ingrid, wore the wreath tiara for the first time at Margrethe’s wedding to Count Henri Laborde de Monpezat in 1967. She continued to wear it regularly at occasions afterward. In 1985, she handed the tiara over to her daughter, Margrethe, who had the jewel altered to make it more flexible.

 

Queen Margrethe wears one of the sections in the back of her hair (Photo: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Queen Margrethe has been incredibly inventive in the ways that she wears the piece, donning parts of it as a brooch and arranging the sections in various ways in her hair. She remarked in De Kongelige Juveler, which we recently discussed here, that she enjoys the versatility of the tiara. She noted, “I like wearing it slightly differently from time to time, and I think my hairdresser enjoys doing it like that, too.”

 

Queen Margrethe wears the tiara (Photo: NILS MEILVANG/AFP/Getty Images)

Margrethe has worn the tiara, which is part of the Danish Royal Property Trust, frequently over the past several decades, often pairing it with an important diamond necklace from the Danish crown jewel collection. She even chose the aigrette for one of the most important Danish royal occasions of the twenty-first century: the wedding of her elder son, Crown Prince Frederik, to Mary Donaldson in 2004.