The Queen Mary Fringe Tiara

Queen Elizabeth II wears the Queen Mary Fringe Tiara for the New Zealand Diamond Jubilee portrait. 

Queen Mary’s penchant for collecting stupendous tiaras began a long time ago  and when she died in 1953, she had amassed a fortune on these valuable gems, many of which present-day royals continue to wear during glittering banquets and state occasions. Her interest in dismantling existing royal jewels was also widely known and she would commission her jewellers to make something new out of these disassembled pieces. 

In 1893, Princess Mary of Teck married Prince George, Duke of York, second in line to the British throne. As a wedding gift, the groom’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, gave her a stunning Collingwood necklace. But ever the jewelry innovator, in 1919, by now queen consort,  she asked Garrard  to dismantle the necklace and use the diamonds to make a fringe. Garrard assembled 47 diamond bars in gold and silver, separated by smaller diamond spikes. Thus, the Queen Mary Fringe Tiara, came out.

Queen Mary gave this tiara to her daughter-in-law, the Duchess of York and future Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, in 1936. Before the year ended, her son, King Edward VIII, abdicated and his younger brother, the Duke of York, reluctantly succeeded him as king.   When Queen Elizabeth first wore the tiara, Sir Henry Channon certainly abhorred it, remarking that it was "an ugly spiked tiara."

Fast forward, in 1947, the heiress-presumptive to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth, was to be married to Lt. Philip Mountbatten (formerly Prince of Greece and Denmark). For this big day, the queen, lent the fringe tiara to her daughter. As tradition dictated, only married women could wear tiaras and it was the future queen’s first time to wear such a piece.

A tiara mishap happened shortly before the wedding ceremony. That morning , while the hairdresser was attaching the tiara on the bride’s veil, the antique metal frame snapped. The bride was terrified but the queen reminded her daughter that she could always choose other tiaras. Elizabeth, however, insisted that she wanted to wear that particular piece. The court jeweller hastened to the nearest Garrard workshop to have the tiara mended.  The wedding went on and went down as the most memorable  postwar gathering of royalty. The tiara was returned to Queen Elizabeth and it was kept in oblivion until it t resurfaced in 1973, when  Princess Anne borrowed it for her wedding. 

When Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died in 2022, Queen Elizabeth II inherited the tiara.  The queen is rarely seen wearing this tiara, and when she does, it was usually during state gatherings and portraits, most notably for the Diamond Jubilee portrait for New Zealand.

Queen Mary’s fringe tiara is always wrongly identified as the "George III Fringe Tiara" or the "Hanoverian Fringe Tiara." The latter was made for Queen Adelaide and this piece still belongs to Royal Family but it was never seen in public for decades. Hugh Roberts described Queen Adelaide's fringe as a "less finely graduated form" of tiara and better worn as a necklace. Queen Mary's fringe, meanwhile, is a "new, smaller, neater and more modern-looking tiara."