Queen Camilla Sparkles in the Queen Mother’s Cartier Art Deco Bracelets

On Friday, King Charles III and Queen Camilla hosted a special dinner at his Highgrove estate, with Camilla sparkling in a pair of special Cartier bracelets for the occasion.

The King toasted his guests, which included celebrities from the worlds of food, sports, fashion, design, and theater, during an Italian dinner at Highgrove House in Gloucestershire on Friday. The meal was designed to highlight the “slow food” initiative, founded in the 1980s in Italy, that celebrates sustainability and good food for all. During his remarks, the monarch said, “Good food brings people together and what we choose to eat helps to define us–as families, communities and nations. It brings us sustenance, but also comfort. It binds generations, as recipes are passed down from one to another.” The dinner comes ahead of planned state visits to Italy and the Vatican in April.

Queen Camilla, shown here chatting with Dame Helen Mirren and David and Victoria Beckham, wore a favorite midnight blue velvet evening gown for the dinner. The dress has a distinctive geometric design.

Camilla brought out some familiar jewelry pieces to pair with the velvet dress, including her grandmother’s Van Cleef & Arpels diamond serpent necklace. She matched the blue fabric of the gown to her earrings: diamond clips with sapphire and diamond cluster drops, personally-owned jewels that she has often paired with the George VI Sapphires.

On her left wrist, Camilla wore two more special pieces of jewelry set with sapphires and diamonds: two Cartier bracelets that come from the collection of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Here’s a closer look at the bracelets sparkling on Camilla’s wrist during the Highgrove dinner. She’s wearing two of the five bracelets from the set: one set with diamonds and sapphires, and one of the two all-diamond bracelets.

In total, there are five bracelets in the collection. Acquired from Cartier in the 1920s, when Elizabeth was Duchess of York, they have a distinctive, balanced Art Deco design. Of the five bracelets, two of them are set solely with diamonds, while the other three combine diamonds and colorful precious gemstones: one set with rubies, one with emeralds, and one with sapphires. Elizabeth liked to wear all five of them together, jauntily stacked on one of her wrists, in formal portraits taken during her first decade as a royal.

In these rigidly-posed pictures, the casual jumble of bracelets adds a fascinating air of modernity to an otherwise traditional royal image. The Duke, standing beside his wife in full uniform and decorations, could have stepped straight out of the nineteenth century, but his fashionable wife belongs squarely in the modern era with her drop-waist dress, sautoir necklaces, low-slung tiara, and carefree bracelets.

Even better, the bracelets could be placed on a frame, three at a time, and worn as a bandeau-style tiara. Here, the Duchess wears the tiara for a trip the ballet in Covent Garden in the summer of 1933.

The bracelets were passed from the Queen Mother to Queen Elizabeth II. Unlike her mother, the younger Elizabeth generally liked to wear the bracelets one or two at a time. Here, she wears two of them on her right wrist at her last gala function, the Diplomatic Reception in 2019.

Here’s a closer look at the two bracelets she stacked together on that evening: the emerald and diamond bracelet, paired with one of the two all-diamond jewels.

Now, the bracelets are part of the jewelry collection supervised by King Charles and Queen Camilla. She wore one of the bracelets for the first time in public almost exactly a year ago: for a Valentine’s Day reception at Grosvenor House celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio. She matched the diamond and emerald bracelet from the set to her green velvet dress for the occasion.

And in December, we saw her wear the ruby and diamond bracelet for the first time, pairing it with a red velvet dress and a boatload of heirloom diamonds for the Qatari state banquet at Buckingham Palace.

Now, Camilla has worn all three of the colorful bracelets, plus one of the all-diamond pieces. As usual, there was one more piece of Van Cleef jewelry on her person for the Highgrove dinner: her blue agate bracelet from the brand’s distinctive Alhambra line.