On the morning of 24 February 1981, the day her engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced, Lady Diana Spencer (soon to become Princess Diana) arrived at the press conference wearing twelve carats of Ceylon sapphire on her left hand. Fourteen brilliant-cut diamonds around it. Eighteen-carat white gold. A serious ring.

The interesting thing isn't the size or the price tag (around £28,000 at the time, which was substantial but not by royal standards extraordinary). The interesting thing is that anyone else could have bought it. The Crown Jeweller had walked into Buckingham Palace with a tray of standard pieces from Garrard, laid them out, and waited. Diana, then nineteen, pointed at a page. The Prince of Wales, by every account, did not object.

This was a small thing and an enormous thing. It is also, I think, where the story of Princess Diana's jewellery actually begins. Not at the wedding five months later, when she would walk down the aisle of St Paul's wearing her family's Spencer Tiara. Not at the state dinners that followed, where the Cambridge Lover's Knot would be lent down from the Queen's vault. The story begins at the engagement, with a ring chosen from a Garrard catalogue, in a small act of independence that almost nobody noticed at the time.

Royal engagement rings are supposed to be commissioned. They're built piece by piece, usually with stones drawn from family heirlooms. The Queen Mother's sapphire cluster was made by Cartier. The Queen's own ring was made by Philip Antrobus, using diamonds from Prince Philip's mother's tiara. Both unique objects. Diana's ring, by contrast, was replicable on demand. The Garrard switchboard reportedly took nine thousand calls in the first week from women wanting to order one.

What I find interesting about this, and what I think the Princess Diana jewellery story really turns on, is that the moment wasn't accidental. She didn't pick the ring because she didn't know better. She picked it because she did. The choice was the point. She wasn't borrowing the Crown's taste; she was using her own.

That decision, made by a teenager pointing at a page, set the tone for the next sixteen years of how she wore everything else.

The engagement ring

She wore the ring for the whole of her married life and for the eleven years of single life that followed. She was wearing it on the night she died in Paris in August 1997.

After her death, William and Harry were allowed to choose keepsakes from their mother's belongings. Harry chose the ring. William chose Diana's Cartier Tank watch. Some years later, according to the brothers' biographer Robert Lacey, Harry gave William the ring back, because William had met Catherine Middleton and the ring was meant for whoever proposed first. The watch went to Harry in exchange. I find this trade enormously touching in a way that has nothing to do with the jewellery itself; the brothers worked out, between themselves, which object belonged to which life.

William produced the ring from a backpack in Kenya in October 2010 and proposed to Catherine on the shore of a small lake. When the engagement was announced a month later, the ring's reappearance on a new hand was the single most-photographed object in British public life that month.

It has aged well, the ring, partly because it was always slightly out of fashion. Halo-setting cluster rings were a Victorian taste, briefly revived in the early 1980s, in and out of style ever since. The ring exists outside the trend cycle now. It is just the ring.

The Spencer Tiara

The piece she wore at her wedding wasn't borrowed from the Crown Jewels. It was hers, or her family's, which is much the same thing when the family is the Spencers.

The Spencer Tiara had been assembled in the 1930s from elements going back to the eighteenth century. A central diamond floral piece from an 1875 brooch presented to Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill. Additional components added by Diana's grandmother. The whole thing reset by Garrard in 1937. Diana's sisters had both worn it at their own weddings before her.

That single fact says quite a lot about who Diana was when she became royal. She brought her own jewellery in. The Spencers had been at the centre of English aristocratic life for four hundred years; they didn't need to borrow from the Windsors. The tiara stayed with the family and has lived at Althorp, the Spencer family seat, for most of the time since 1981. Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, has lent it to his daughters for their weddings. Like most really old jewellery, it goes to work on a schedule of generations.

The Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara

This one she did borrow.

The Cambridge Lover's Knot was originally made for Queen Mary in 1914, modelled on a piece that had belonged to her grandmother: diamonds and pearls arranged in a series of interlocking knots and arches, with pendant pearls that swing as the wearer moves. Mary left it to the Queen in 1953. The Queen lent it to Diana shortly after the wedding.

Diana wore it at most state occasions for the first half of her marriage. She also, by her own admission, hated it. The pendant pearls swung against the metal frame as she moved and clicked against her ears, and the weight (the tiara is genuinely heavy) gave her serious headaches. She wore it anyway. That was, I think, characteristic. She did her job in the equipment provided, complained to her friends about it later, and continued.

The tiara went back into the royal vault after Diana and Charles separated and stayed there for nearly twenty years. In 2015, the Queen gave it to Catherine Middleton, who has since worn it at most state dinners requiring a tiara. The clicking pearl problem, by all accounts, has not been solved. Catherine appears not to complain.

The Saudi Sapphire Suite

In 1981, as a wedding gift, Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia sent Diana a suite of sapphire and diamond jewellery: a necklace, a pendant, a ring, a bracelet, earrings, and a wristwatch, all matched in design, with cushion-cut sapphires the size of large grapes set in geometric diamond surrounds. The suite was Art Deco influenced and looked nothing like anything else Diana had been given. It was meant to be worn as a single coherent set.

She never did. She wore the necklace first, then had it reset by Garrard in 1987 into a choker, then again in the 1990s into a different choker entirely. She wore the earrings most often. The bracelet went almost unworn in public. The watch was never seen.

This is one of the most-asked questions about Diana's jewellery: where did the Saudi suite go? The answer is that most of it appears to be still in royal possession. The reset choker has been seen on Catherine Middleton at state dinners. The earrings were lent to Meghan Markle around the time of her 2018 wedding and have been worn by her since.

What's worth noticing about the Saudi suite is what Diana did with it. The expected royal behaviour with a gift like that is to wear it as given, in full, preferably in the donor's presence. Diana, instead, broke it up. She had pieces reset to suit how she actually wanted to look. That's what real wearers of real jewellery have always done. Fashion ages, settings tire, the way you want to be photographed in 1991 is not the way you wanted to be photographed in 1981. But it is not, by royal standards, what one is supposed to do with a diplomatic gift. She did it anyway.

The Swan Lake Suite

By the early 1990s, Charles and Diana's marriage had collapsed in public. In 1991, anticipating the tenth anniversary of their wedding, Charles commissioned Garrard to make Diana a suite of jewellery based on a swan motif: a necklace, earrings, ring, and bracelet, all set with pearls and diamonds. The pieces are often called the Swan Lake Suite, though Garrard's records list them under a different name.

Diana wore the suite once, at a Royal Opera House gala in June 1997. It was her last major public appearance wearing significant jewellery. Two months later she was dead.

The pieces remained at Kensington Palace and were eventually placed in trust for her sons. They have not, as far as is publicly known, been worn since. The necklace has been displayed once, in a 2017 exhibition at Kensington Palace marking the twentieth anniversary of Diana's death.

The Swan Lake Suite is the most poignant of Diana's pieces, partly because it represents an attempt to repair something that was already beyond repair. By the time Diana wore it, the marriage had been over for years. I cannot look at it without thinking it was the wrong gift, given too late, but worn beautifully, which is a version of how she wore everything in the last years of her life.

The night in Melbourne

The most photographed single moment in the entire history of Diana's jewellery happened in Melbourne in October 1985, when she arrived at a dinner at the Southern Cross Hotel wearing an emerald and diamond choker as a headband.

The choker had been a wedding gift from the Queen, an Art Deco piece made by Cartier in the 1920s, originally part of a longer necklace owned by Queen Mary, who had broken it up in the 1930s and worn the central element as a choker herself. Diana, around the headband moment, was twenty-four years old, three years into the marriage, and beginning to understand that she could direct her own image through choices nobody had told her to make.

The look (a low-cut Bruce Oldfield gown, pearl earrings, the emerald choker pulled around her hairline and held flat against her forehead) broke every expectation of what a princess was meant to look like at a state dinner. Photographs ran on the front pages of every newspaper that mattered for weeks. The Queen, by accounts that have circulated since, was not pleased.

It remains an extraordinary thing to have done with a piece of state jewellery. Most royal women, before or since, have worn their inherited stones the way the inherited stones expected to be worn. Diana wore this one like she'd bought it that afternoon from a shop in Knightsbridge. The choker has not been worn in public since, at least not as a headband, and I'm not sure it ever could be. She used it up.

The pearls

Diana wore more pearls than any other category of jewellery, partly because pearls suited the eighties palette of the clothes she was being put in, and partly because pearls suited her face. The South African choker, a seven-strand pearl piece given to her by the Queen for her twentieth birthday in 1981, became her workhorse. She wore it dozens of times over fifteen years.

There were others. A double strand worn with the famous black "revenge dress" by Christina Stambolian in June 1994, the night Charles confessed his affair on television. A single strand worn constantly in the early years. A pearl and amethyst suite from the Queen Mother. A pair of pearl drop earrings she wore so often they are sometimes called the Diana earrings; they appear in maybe forty different photographs across as many state occasions.

The South African choker is in the royal vault. The amethyst suite is too. The drop earrings have been worn by Catherine.

I think this is the point at which I should admit that I find pearls, particularly the way Diana wore them in great single-strand columns against simple necklines, the single most underrated piece of late-twentieth-century British style. We are still recovering from her decisions about how to look in pearls. Most current pearl jewellery worn by women under fifty owes something to a photograph of Diana taken between 1989 and 1996. (For more on how to actually wear pearls now, see our pearl style guide.)

The Walker years

In the final years of her life, Diana commissioned new jewellery less often and rewore old jewellery more thoughtfully. Most of the dresses she wore from 1990 onwards were designed by Catherine Walker, who understood Diana's body and Diana's pieces in a way her earlier dressmakers had not.

The Walker collaboration produced what is now the visual canon of late-period Diana: the lean column dresses, the velvet, the deep jewel-tone colours, the considered restraint of single pieces of jewellery worn carefully rather than full sets worn dutifully. There is a series of photographs from a 1995 charity event in Manhattan, Diana in a fitted black Walker gown, wearing nothing but the engagement ring and a pair of pearl drops, that captures the shift better than any analysis can. She had stopped wearing the marriage. She had not stopped wearing herself.

After the divorce was finalised in August 1996, she returned the formal Crown property and kept what she had personally bought or commissioned. There was not very much of the latter. The pieces she kept she wore constantly in the year between the divorce and her death.

If you want to understand how to wear important jewellery without being worn by it, the Walker-era photographs are the textbook.

What was inherited

When Diana died in August 1997, her jewellery was divided between her sons. The major personal pieces (the engagement ring, the Swan Lake Suite, certain pearls, items she had bought or commissioned herself) went into trust. State property reverted to the Crown.

Catherine has, over the past fifteen years, worn the engagement ring almost daily, the Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara at state dinners, the Saudi sapphire choker on a handful of significant occasions, and various Diana pearl earrings regularly enough that they have become identified with her rather than with Diana. That is, I think, the point of inheriting jewellery. At some stage it stops being the previous wearer's. It becomes yours.

Meghan Markle has worn Diana's aquamarine ring (Diana had commissioned it in 1996, from a brooch she had inherited and broken up), most notably at her wedding reception in May 2018. She has also worn a pair of Diana's gold bracelets. Whether she retains access to those pieces now is a question the Palace has not commented on and presumably will not.

The Swan Lake Suite, the South African pearl choker, and most of the other major state-property pieces are in the royal vault. They will emerge again. That is how royal jewellery works. The pieces wait. They are worn by the next person, and the person after that.

What survived

Princess Diana's jewellery is unusual among royal collections in that an enormous number of high-quality photographs exist of every major piece, in dozens of different contexts, on a single woman. We know what she wore, when she wore it, what dress she paired it with, what tiara at which state dinner. The visual archive is among the most complete of any royal woman in history.

This is partly because Diana was photographed more than any other British royal before or since, and partly because she was, herself, attentive to what she was wearing in a way most royal women had not previously been. The pieces were not merely worn; they were chosen. Sometimes provocatively. The emerald choker on the forehead. The double pearls with the revenge dress. The Spencer Tiara worn while marrying into a family whose own jewellery she could have borrowed.

What I think she did with her jewellery, and this is the version of her I find most compelling, the version that has nothing to do with the gossip, is use it as the most consistent form of self-expression available to her in a life that was, in most other respects, severely constrained. The pieces gave her a vocabulary. She used them.

The ring on Catherine's hand is the most public reminder of that. The next time you see it photographed (and you will, often), try to remember it was once on a different hand. Bought from a catalogue. On a winter morning forty-five years ago. By a nineteen-year-old who pointed at a page and said that one.

Frequently asked questions

Where is Princess Diana's engagement ring now?

The ring is worn by Catherine, Princess of Wales (Kate Middleton), who has worn it daily since Prince William proposed to her with it in October 2010. Prince Harry initially inherited the ring after Diana's death in 1997, and gave it to William in exchange for their mother's Cartier Tank watch when William met Catherine.

Who inherited Princess Diana's jewellery?

Diana's jewellery was divided between Princes William and Harry after her death in August 1997. Her personal pieces, including the engagement ring and the Swan Lake Suite, were placed in trust. Crown property, including the Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara, reverted to the royal collection. Many pieces have since been worn by Catherine, Princess of Wales, and several have been lent to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

What was Princess Diana's most famous piece of jewellery?

The Ceylon sapphire engagement ring is the single most photographed piece. The Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara, with its pendant pearls, is the most photographed of her state-occasion pieces. The emerald and diamond choker she wore as a headband in Melbourne in 1985 produced the single most discussed jewellery moment of her royal years.

Did Kate Middleton inherit Princess Diana's jewellery?

Catherine wears several pieces formerly worn by Diana. The engagement ring, which Catherine has worn daily since 2010, is the most prominent. The Queen also gifted Catherine the Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara in 2015, which Catherine wears at state dinners. The Saudi sapphire choker (Diana's reset of a 1981 wedding-gift necklace) has also been seen on Catherine on several state occasions.

What was the Swan Lake Suite?

A suite of pearl and diamond jewellery commissioned by Prince Charles from Garrard in 1991, on the tenth anniversary of his marriage to Diana. Diana wore it only once, at a Royal Opera House gala in June 1997, two months before her death. It is held in trust for her sons and has been publicly displayed only once, at a 2017 Kensington Palace exhibition.

Is Princess Diana's jewellery on display anywhere?

Most of Princess Diana's jewellery is held privately, either in royal possession or in trust for her sons. Selected pieces have been displayed at temporary exhibitions, notably at Kensington Palace in 2017 marking the twentieth anniversary of her death. The Royal Collection Trust does not currently hold any of Diana's jewellery on permanent public display.

Where can I read more stories on The Gem?

The Gem's Stories section covers the history and provenance of significant jewels — from royal collections to cursed stones to house histories. New pieces publish weekly at thegem.press/stories.

Related reading

Sources: Garrard archives; Royal Collection Trust public documentation; Christie's auction records; Robert Lacey, ‘Battle of Brothers’ (Harper Collins, 2020); contemporary press coverage from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and Vanity Fair. Photography references: Getty Editorial, PA Images, Royal Collection Trust. Some attributions remain folkloric and have been noted as such in the text. This article was last reviewed in May 2026.

Florence is the founding editor of The Gem.