The Spencer Tiara: Diana Did Not Wear a Royal Tiara to Her Wedding

Almost everyone believes Diana wore a royal tiara on her wedding day. She did not.

On July 29, 1981 she walked into St Paul’s wearing a tiara that belonged to her own family — the Spencers — and that had nothing to do with the Crown. The royal collection was open to her. She wore her family’s instead.

I get asked about this tiara more than any other, usually by a bride who has seen the photograph and wants to know whether she can have something like it. So here is what it actually is, what it is made of, and the one lesson in it that matters if you are choosing a tiara of your own.

It is a Spencer heirloom, not a Crown jewel

This is the part that surprises people. Royal brides are often lent a tiara from the royal collection for the day. Diana had that option and did not take it.

The Spencer Tiara belongs to the Spencer family and still does. It sits with them, not with the royal family, and it has been worn by Spencer brides before and since. That ownership is the whole reason it keeps reappearing at weddings instead of at state banquets.

If you have ever wondered why you see it at family weddings and almost nowhere else — that is why.

What it is actually made of

Diamonds set in silver and gold, in a design of stylized flowers.

• Tulip shapes at the center of each section.
• Star-shaped and trumpet-shaped blooms along the band.
• Scrolling foliage linking the whole run together, so the eye travels along it rather than stopping at one point.

That last detail is the design decision worth noticing. It is not a single tall centerpiece with smaller shapes either side, which is how most statement tiaras are built. It is a continuous garden. There is no obvious front.

It is a shape I come back to constantly in my own work, and it is why pieces like my Lace Garden Crown and The Crystal Conservatory Crown are built as runs of blooms rather than as a single peak.

It was assembled, not commissioned

Here is the detail that almost nobody knows, and the one I find most useful.

The Spencer Tiara is not one object made at one moment. It is a composite. The center section is the oldest part, and further elements were added to it in the decades that followed, with the jeweller Garrard bringing the pieces together into the single band you see in the photographs.

So the tiara in Diana’s wedding photographs is a family’s accumulated jewelry, reshaped into one piece. It was built the way families actually build things: a bit at a time, by different hands, across generations.

The brides who have worn it

This is a working tiara, not a museum piece. It goes out, it gets worn, it comes back.

• Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah and Lady Jane, both wore it at their own weddings in the 1970s — before Diana did.
• Diana wore it in 1981.
• Victoria Lockwood wore it in 1989, marrying Diana’s brother Charles.
• Celia McCorquodale, Diana’s niece, wore it in 2018 — and the photographs went around the world because the resemblance was so strong.

Five brides in one family, one tiara, nearly fifty years. That is the actual story here, and it is a better one than the price.

What it is worth, and why nobody can tell you

You will find figures online. Treat all of them as guesses.

The Spencer Tiara has never been publicly valued, and it is not for sale, so there is no sale price to point at. Any number you read has been worked out from the outside by someone estimating stone weights from photographs.

There is also a second value sitting on top of the stones that no valuer can price cleanly: the fact that Diana wore it. That is not a diamond figure, it is a history figure, and it is the reason any honest answer to “what is it worth” is “more than the diamonds, and nobody knows how much more.”

I wrote about the same problem from the other direction when I looked at whether Swarovski crystal is worth the money in a bridal piece. The stones are the easy part to price. Everything else is not.

What a bride should actually take from it

Two things, and the second one is the one I would actually press on you.

First: a tiara does not have to be new. The Spencer is an assembled family piece and it is the most photographed bridal tiara of the last century. If your mother or grandmother has something, take it to a jeweller before you buy anything. A reset or a repair is often cheaper than a new piece and it already means something.

Second: weight is the thing nobody warns you about. Diana was widely reported to have found the tiara heavy and uncomfortable on the day — and she wore it for a few hours in 1981, not for a twelve-hour American wedding day with a reception at the end of it.

A heavy tiara is not a sign of quality. It is a sign of a solid base and dense stone setting, and by the time the speeches start you will know about it. Everything I make sits on a flexible silver-plated base that grips the hair instead of pressing down on the crown of the head. That is not a cheaper way to build it; it is a decision about the eleventh hour of your day rather than the first.

If you are not sure whether a tiara is right for your hair at all, I compared a headband against a tiara in detail, and wrote the longer method for wearing a veil with a tiara if that is the question you are really asking.

If you want something with the same character

Nobody is going to sell you the Spencer Tiara. But its character — a continuous run of flowers, no single peak, light rather than imposing — is something you can have.

My Lace Garden Crown at 200 dollars is the closest in spirit: a band of blooms with no obvious center. The Crystal Conservatory Crown at 170 dollars is the lighter, smaller version of the same idea. The Love in Bloom Tiara at 235 dollars is the one for a bride who does want height, and the Majestic Brilliance Tiara at 300 dollars is the most imposing thing I make, for the bride who read all of the above and still wants the room to stop.

All of them are handmade to order in my Istanbul studio in four to twelve working days, with free FedEx shipping. If you are still deciding between stones, I set out how I choose between pearl and crystal for each bride, and the bridal accessories checklist puts the tiara in the order it should actually be bought.

One more royal tiara, if you are enjoying this

The Spencer is the famous one. The Braganza Tiara is the enormous one — a glittering giant with a very different story, and the piece people ask me about second most often.

And if you are reading this because you have a photograph of a tiara you love and no idea whether anything like it exists at a real price: send it to me. I will tell you honestly whether I can get close, and when the answer is no, I will say so.