Nobel Tiara Prize: Victoria’s Connaught vs Victoria’s Steel

Crown Princess Victoria made a splash in heirloom diamonds—and a vintage gown!—at the Nobel Prize celebrations in December 2018.

Crown Princess Victoria surprise royal watchers on December 10, 2018, when she arrived for the Nobel Prize festivities wearing a vintage Nina Ricci gown from her mother’s archives. The pink, green, and gray taffeta dress was Queen Silvia for the Nobels in 1995 (paired with Queen Sofia’s Tiara).

Crown Princess Victoria also wore diamonds with the Nina Ricci gown for the Nobels, but she selected a different tiara, brooch, and earrings to go with the dress.

Victoria reached for the Connaught Diamond Tiara, a looping floral diadem that was given to her paternal great-grandmother, Princess Margaret of Connaught, as a wedding present when she married the future King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in June 1905. The diadem was also a beloved jewel of Victoria’s grandmother, Princess Sibylla, and the family still strongly associates the tiara with Sibylla’s memory.

Crown Princess Victoria also wore additional pieces of gorgeous floral jewelry from the family collection for the 2018 Nobels: the diamond floral earrings, which have large diamond pendant drops, and one of the family’s diamond rose brooches.

Here’s one more look at Victoria’s blossoming diamonds from the 2018 Nobel ceremony.

For the Nobels in 2016, Crown Princess Victoria paired pieces from two sets of jewelry with links to the French imperial court of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Crown Princess Victoria wowed us all with a billowing ballgown from H&M when she arrived for the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 2016.

She picked up the metallic thread in the gown by wearing a golden tiara from the family vaults.

The unique Napoleonic Cut-Steel Tiara is a rare diadem that shines without diamonds, using gleaming polished steel and rich yellow gold instead. The tiara originally belonged to Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Josephine and, for a time, Queen of Holland. It came to Sweden decades later when it was inherited by Hortense’s niece, Queen Josefina.

Victoria paired the unusual tiara with the earrings, necklace, brooch, and bracelet from the stunning Cameo Parure, a suite of jewelry that was made for Hortense’s mother, Empress Josephine of France.

The gorgeous cameos are a natural pair with the cut-steel tiara, echoing the Bernadottes’ roots at the court of the Bonapartes. And the cameos are also important to Victoria for a more sentimental reason: she wore them on her wedding day in 2010.