
Today, Princess Caroline of Monaco celebrates her birthday. In her honor, we’ve got a look at a glamorous appearance by the princess at Versailles, wearing a pair of dazzling, delicate diamond wings.

On November 19, 2007, Princess Caroline celebrated Monaco’s National Day in the principality before jetting to France, where she was on hand for the viewing of a special exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. The exhibition, Quand Versailles était meublé d’argent (“When Versailles Was Furnished With Silver”), celebrated the silver furnishings commissioned for the palace by King Louis XIV.

Princess Caroline was part of the exhibition gala because her (now estranged) husband, Prince Ernst August of Hanover, allowed pieces of silver furniture from the Hanoverian family collection to be displayed as part of the exhibition. Other royal and noble families also loaned silver furnishings from the show.
Queen Margrethe II and Prince Henrik of Denmark, shown with Caroline here, loaned out pieces from the collection at Rosenborg Slot. For the gala, Margrethe wore vivid pink and orange, paired with pearls and diamonds from the Danish Royal Property Trust, including a pair of earrings recently worn by Queen Mary.

Caroline also selected some glamorous jewelry pieces for the exhibition viewing. She wore a black satin gown styled to resemble a tuxedo —Chanel, I presume—and paired it with impressive diamonds.

The spotlight jewelry pieces from the ensemble were the pair of diamond-studded wings that Caroline pinned to the lapels of her dress. The wings are antique jewelry pieces from Chaumet. It was a particularly fitting choice to wear jewels from the French firm at Versailles, as the company’s roots date back to the 1780s, when its founder, Marie-Étienne Nitot, was apprenticed to Ange-Joseph Aubert, the official crown jeweler of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Later, of course, Nitot would become Napoleon’s court jeweler as well.
Caroline’s wings are set with diamonds and sapphires. She has always worn the jewels as brooches, but they can also apparently be set on a slender tiara frame and worn as an aigrette. Exactly how the wings arrived in Caroline’s jewelry box does not appear to be public knowledge, though some have speculated that they may have been a gift from her close friend Karl Lagerfeld. (He’s also the one who is suspected to have given Caroline another antique Chaumet jewel, her diamond reed stomacher.)

With the wings, Caroline wore a pair of large diamond floral earrings. These are part of a suite of diamond floral jewelry that she inherited from her grandmother, Princess Charlotte, Duchess of Valentinois. The jewels are believed to date to the nineteenth century, and it’s not clear how Princess Charlotte acquired them.
The set also includes a large floral garland, which can be worn as one large devant de corsage or as smaller, separate brooches. In 2011, Caroline memorably loaned the garland to her new sister-in-law, Princess Charlene, to wear on her wedding day. Eight years later, Caroline’s elder daughter, Charlotte Casiraghi, also wore her great-grandmother’s diamond flowers with her bridal ensemble.
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