Our royal birthday tiara tributes continue today with a look at a gorgeous gala appearance from Princess Mabel of Orange-Nassau, who celebrated her birthday last week.
One of Mabel’s best tiara moments, if you ask me, took place in April 2013, on the night before her mother-in-law, Princess Beatrix, abdicated and her brother-in-law, King Willem-Alexander, succeeded the throne of the Netherlands. For a dinner held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on the night before the inauguration, Mabel arrived with her brother-in-law, Prince Constantijn, and his wife, Princess Laurentien. A year earlier, Mabel’s husband, Prince Johan Friso, had been gravely injured in a skiing accident in Austria. He died a few months after this event took place.
For the gala dinner, Princess Mabel wore a fun and festive gown made of red fringe, accessorized with gorgeous diamond pieces. (Her sister-in-law, Princess Laurentien, wore a fantastic blue gown with aquamarines from the family collection. We covered her look in this article!)
Mabel chose to wear a sentimental diadem for the event: her wedding tiara. The jewel, which was originally designed as a necklace, features three cascading rows of diamonds. Some truly substantial stones are set on the top row! The tiara was purchased by the Dutch royals in 1888, during the reign of King Willem III.
Mabel wore the tiara with a pair of classic diamond drop earrings. These feature a stud with a floral design.
She finished off the look with one of my favorite pieces of jewelry from the Dutch royal collection: the Diamond Trellis Necklace. The necklace was made around 1900, reportedly by Koch, and features diamonds set on a delicate knife-edge trellis. Mabel is wearing the all-diamond setting of the necklace here, but the largest diamonds in the piece can also be swapped out for other gemstones, including sapphires, pearls, and rubies.
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