On one of the more memorable days in recent royal history, Queen Camilla held an audience with Dame Anna Wintour at St. James’s Palace to mark the start of London Fashion Week—wearing an appropriately somber brooch.
While the King attended the opening show of London Fashion Week alongside Stella McCartney, Queen Camilla welcomed Dame Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director, to Clarence House in London on Thursday. The ladies posed for photographs in the Garden Room. The room, which, as the name suggests, overlooks the house’s gardens, was created by the Queen Mother in the 1960s by merging together a pair of rooms once used by Princess Margaret.
You’ll also spot some famous pieces of art in the background, including a nineteenth-century Gobelins tapestry, The Massacre of the Mamelukes, that was given to Queen Victoria by Emperor Napoleon III, and a pair of bird-themed landscape paintings by Jakob Bogdani that were acquired by Queen Anne from the estate of Admiral George Churchill in 1710. You can explore all of the artwork and furnishings in the Garden Room on the Google Arts & Culture website.
During the audience, the Queen and the editor reportedly discussed not only British fashion but also the Queen’s Reading Room, one of Camilla’s signature initiatives. Queen Camilla wore black for the occasion, including a dress with velvet trim, while Wintour opted for an ensemble in warm shades of red and orange.
Queen Camilla added some particularly interesting bejeweled accessories to her ensemble. She wore her diamond and sapphire Impératrice Tassel Earrings, modern pieces that come from Fabergé, with an intriguing diamond and enamel brooch. The heart-shaped jewel is similar to one she has worn previously, but this one is an entirely different brooch, featuring a coronet-topped royal cypher rendered in diamonds.
Photographs from the event make it difficult to discern exactly which royal monogram is depicted on the brooch. The use of a coronet means that it’s not the cypher or a king or a queen. Instead, it’s almost certainly the monogram of a prince or princess or even a royal duke or duchess. If I had to hazard a guess, perhaps it’s the cypher of Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll? But even that one doesn’t seem like an exact match. Please drop your guesses in the comments below.
These brooches are tokens of remembrance, created for mourning family members to wear after the death of a royal relative. They were particularly popular in centuries past, when periods of royal mourning could stretch for months or even years. Thursday was certainly a less-than-joyful day in British royal history (though a moment of celebration for those seeking justice!), but it also happened to be the day that the life of a royal cousin, Princess Désirée of Sweden, was honored during a private funeral service in Stockholm. It’s not clear to me that Camilla’s mourning brooch is definitely connected to either of those events, but the coincidental timing is interesting.
A similar brooch resides in the collection of Queen Margrethe of Denmark. It’s a memorial brooch made in honor of her great-grandmother, Princess Louise, Duchess of Connaught. Louise died in March 1917, coincidentally, at Clarence House. Margrethe often wears the brooch for family funerals.
Camilla also owns another petite heart-shaped brooch made of enamel and set with diamonds and pearls. Despite what several other publications have written in recent days (*cough* Tatler), this is a completely different brooch, with a pearl border and a central pearl instead of a cypher. Camilla has, however, worn it with the same pair of sapphire earrings.
As I’ve written before, the Duchess of Gloucester also owns a small heart brooch made from black enamel and diamonds. Here, she wears it on her hat on Armistice Day in November 2022.
Queen Alexandra owned a similar example, too, though hers featured a cupid’s arrow in diamonds piercing the enamel heart.
No mourning brooches in sight where Dame Anna was concerned during Thursday’s audience. She wore her signature stack of paste gemstone necklaces, many of which are antique pieces acquired from S.J. Phillips in London. This particular stack includes necklaces with pale and vibrant pink stones, a necklace with larger purple stones, and a multi-colored necklace with a sea-green pendant.
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