Crowning Glory - Harper's BAZAAR

The tiara, historically a sign of romance, femininity and wealth, is one of the high-jewellery world’s most reinvented accessories. It’s also back in high demand 

When you think of a tiara, you might think of Kate Middleton at her wedding to Prince William or perhaps Meghan Markle marrying Prince Harry. Maybe you think of that scene in The Crown in which Helena Bonham-Carter’s Princess Margaret wears the huge Poltimore tiara (the same one she wore to her wedding) in a bubble bath, or Bridgerton’s Georgian-era-with-a-Dolce & Gabbana-twist head jewellery. You might also think of Sailor Moon’s and Wonder Woman’s gold and red tiaras, which doubled as weapons, or Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls snapping her prom queen tiara and throwing shards to the runners-up. Maybe you’ve worn a tiara yourself: to your wedding, your year 10 formal (as this writer did), a beauty pageant, or as part of a costume. 

Whatever your association with the tiara, you can likely thank Chaumet, the French high-jeweller responsible for creating some of the most stunning and intricate headpieces of the past 240 years. With one finger firmly placed on the zeitgeist, the brand has adapted and transformed its designs over the centuries, redefining what it means to wear a tiara. 

Chaumet has seen the tiara transform from being a royalty-only status symbol to appearing on runways (think Gucci’s 2021 Love Parade, in which models’ tiaras were tangled in their hair). When Chaumet began, tiaras could only be purchased in person. Now, some brands sell them online through Net-A-Porter. No matter the trend or mode of possession, Chaumet has been dedicated to ensuring that if an occasion calls for a tiara, you can find one to suit your style.

The tiara is historically a symbol of power. Its origins can be traced back to ancient Persian kings and the Greeks and Romans, who used ornamental headwear to not-so-subtly indicate their superiority. During the Middle Ages, queens and princesses began to don tiaras, but their incredibly extravagant hairstyles made it difficult to keep them on. Rather than relax on the hair styling, they instead ditched the tiaras, tossing them into a drawer somewhere to gather dust. 

This is where Chaumet comes in. The Parisian jewellery brand began in 1780 as Nitot, named for its founder, Marie-Étienne Nitot, who had severed his ties with Marie Antoinette’s jeweller after the French Revolution. It was a move that gained him a legion of fans, including Napoléon I and his first wife, Empress Joséphine, who was somewhat of a late-18th-century influencer. Napoléon enlisted Nitot as his official jeweller and had its artisans create several tiaras for his wife. Suddenly, the demand for diamond-encrusted head jewellery boomed within royal and noble circles.

In the early 1800s, the brand was sold to the silver- and goldsmith and jeweller Jean Baptiste Fossin, who renamed it after himself. The company continued to create jewellery for French society, inspired by the Italian Renaissance and nature. The clientele expanded to include foreign royalty, painters, sculptors and writers. When the brand expanded to London, under the watchful eye of Jean-Valentin Morel and later his son, Prosper Morel, it attracted British royalty, including Queen Victoria.

Tiaras had come to symbolise femininity, wealth and, most crucially, marriage. Wearing one to a ball was akin to wearing a giant wedding ring on your head. Tiaras became the centrepiece of the wedding basket traditionally given to a bride, symbolising the unification of two households. They became heirlooms, passed down or broken apart to be shared (à la Lohan). Younger owners often had theirs redesigned to suit the fashions of the time. 

In 1885, Prosper’s daughter Marie married the jeweller Joseph Chaumet, who joined the maison. He took over in 1889 and renamed it after himself (as was tradition). Soon after, the tiara trend reached another peak when it went from being exclusively available (read: affordable) to European royalty and began to touch the heads of the newly moneyed New York social set. Women wore them to galas to signify that they’d climbed out of their bourgeois beginnings to reach the top of the social ladder. 

After World War I, right around the time Joseph’s son Marcel inherited the brand, it became gauche to wear a tiara. You’d be right in thinking this was due to rations and changes to the economy, but it was also because women had started to cut their hair short, and the invention of shampoo meant there wasn’t enough oil and grime in there to keep one in place. They slid right off those sleek strands. Still, being the ever-changeable accessory that it is, the tiara adapted. In the 1920s, the Flappers wore them low on the forehead instead of atop the hair (which is actually how Empress Joséphine wore hers in the 1800s — a sign that trends have been on rinse-repeat for centuries). 

Here, the real-world tiara goes on hiatus. The fascination with royal tiaras, though, is perennial. Since the dawn of the internet, royal watchers have been tracing tiaras as they pop up on various princess heads, competing to be the first to identify who loaned it to whom. Queen Elizabeth II was said to have the world’s largest and most valuable collection of tiaras.

While fewer everyday women wore tiaras, they continued to permeate pop culture. Disney princesses, of course, had them, but they also became a symbol of female empowerment. Wonder Woman used hers as a razor-edge projectile weapon, while Sailor Moon’s could blind her opponent with a flash of light. 

The tiara-as-power-move strategy has now entered the real world. Chaumet’s chief executive, Jean-Marc Mansvelt, told The New York Times in 2019 that one of their clients was a business owner who “ordered a significant tiara to wear from time to time in business occasions, in front of a few hundred guys who were her salespeople. Like an empress.” You have to respect that.

He also noted that tiaras have been experiencing a comeback in the past few years. “Many people today are trying to find references in the past, looking for tradition,” he said. The resurgence also gained speed thanks to Bridgerton, the 2020 Netflix hit that saw online searches for and sales of Regency-era attire — including tiaras — increase during the pandemic lockdowns and beyond.

As we emerge from years of wearing daytime pyjamas, the time for frivolous dressing is upon us. Chaumet’s Joséphine Valse Impériale tiara, which Shanina Shaik wears so effortlessly here, doesn’t require an ostentatious bouffant to keep it in place. The new-era tiara works with a slicked-back low chignon (or a messy bun) and no-makeup makeup. Instead of swapping your shoes or bag when you’re going from desk to bar, it’s time to pop on a tiara.

This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Shanina Shaik photographed by Bec Parsons'; styled by Vanessa Coyle.