The Wolfers Tiara

This piece was one of Queen Fabiola’s wedding presents. It was given to her in December 1960 on behalf of the brokers and jewelers of the diamond industry in Antwerp. The diamond tiara, which can also be worn as a necklace, was crafted on their behalf by Wolfers, a company that had been making jewelry in Belgium for more than a century. The piece is small but versatile, and it’s not lacking in glitter, as it’s packed with more than 200 diamonds.

Fabiola wore the tiara regularly during her queenship, sometimes as a diadem, and sometimes as a necklace. She often wore the piece as a necklace while wearing either the Spanish Wedding Gift Tiara or the Nine Provinces Tiara. Above, she pairs the necklace with the bandeau setting of the Nine Provinces.

She also wore the necklace alone, as she does in the photograph above. While the tiara setting looked rather small nestled in Fabiola’s voluminous bouffant, it provided substantial sparkle as a necklace.

Fabiola’s husband, King Baudouin, died in 1993; after his death, this necklace/tiara and many of her more elaborate jewels were worn rarely, if at all. We learned shortly after Fabiola’s death in December 2014 that she had donated all of her possessions to Hulpfonds van de Koningin, a charity that she founded after becoming Belgium’s queen consort. But, as it turns out, the Wolfers Tiara was not one of those possessions.

In October 2015, Queen Mathilde, the wife of Fabiola’s nephew, King Philippe, wore the tiara in public for the first time. We knew that Fabiola had privately distributed some of her jewelry to family members before her death, and it’s clear that she reserved some of the grandest pieces for Mathilde. The reemergence of some of these pieces, including the Wolfers Tiara, has given many of us hope that Fabiola’s biggest diadem, the Spanish Wedding Gift Tiara, may be hidden away in Mathilde’s jewelry collection, too.

Mathilde has used the Wolfers Tiara often, both as a tiara and as a necklace, in the years since. Above, she wears it during an official visit from the Governor General of Australia to Belgium in 2016.

And here, she wears the jewel as a necklace, paired with the complete Nine Provinces Tiara, during the Dutch state visit to Belgium in June 2023.

In October 2023, the Wolfers Tiara made its first appearance on a third generation of the Belgian royal family. The Duchess of Brabant wore the tiara in Copenhagen for a gala at Christiansborg Palace celebrating the 18th birthday of Prince Christian of Denmark.