On the morning of 24 February 1981, the day her engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced, Lady Diana Spencer's left hand carried an oval Ceylon sapphire of approximately twelve carats, encircled by fourteen brilliant-cut diamonds, set in eighteen-carat white gold. The ring had been chosen from a tray of options brought from Garrard. Anyone walking into the shop on Albemarle Street that morning could, in theory, have bought it. The price was around £28,000.
This was not how royal engagement rings were supposed to work. The Queen Mother's sapphire and diamond cluster had been commissioned. The Queen's own engagement ring had been made by Philip Antrobus, using diamonds from a tiara belonging to Prince Philip's mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. Diana, then nineteen, had pointed at a page and said she liked that one. The Prince, by every account, did not object. Whether this was charming or scandalous depended entirely on who you asked, and which paper you read.
It also doesn't really matter, because the ring is now on Catherine Middleton's hand and has been since November 2010 — and that fact alone is the spine of Diana's jewellery story. The pieces outlived her. They moved. Some of them are still moving.
Here are the ones that did.
The engagement ring
The Ceylon sapphire — twelve carats, deep cornflower blue, in a setting designed unmistakably to be seen at a distance — was the ring Diana wore 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 — the brothers' biographer Robert Lacey has written about this in some detail — Harry gave William the ring back, because William had met Catherine and the ring was meant for whoever proposed first. The watch went to Harry in exchange.
William produced the ring from a backpack during a holiday in Kenya in October 2010 and proposed to Catherine on the shore of Lake Alice. 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. The Garrard switchboard reportedly took 9,000 calls in the first week from women trying to order a copy.
Catherine still wears it. It has aged well, in part because it was always slightly out of fashion. Halo-setting cluster rings were a Victorian taste, briefly revived in the early 1980s, and have drifted in and out of style ever since. The ring exists outside the trend cycle now. It's just the ring.
The Spencer Tiara
The piece Diana wore at her wedding wasn't borrowed from the Crown Jewels. It was hers, or her family's. The Spencer Tiara had been assembled in the 1930s from elements going back to the eighteenth century — a central diamond floral element 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.
That fact — that the tiara at the most-watched wedding of the twentieth century was not state property — said something 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. Earl Spencer, Diana's brother, has lent it to his daughters for their weddings. It has lived at Althorp, the Spencer family seat, for most of the time since 1981. It's not on public display.
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 the Cambridge Lover's Knot 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 the resulting click against her ears, combined with the considerable weight of the piece, gave her serious headaches. She wore it anyway.
The tiara went back into the royal vault after Diana and Charles separated. It 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 has not, by all accounts, been solved.
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 a single coherent set.
Diana never wore it as a set. She wore the necklace first, then had it reset by Garrard in 1987 into a choker, and 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? Most of it appears to be still in royal possession. The reset choker has been seen on Catherine Middleton on at least three occasions, including a state visit in 2017. The earrings were lent to Meghan Markle around the time of her 2018 wedding and have been worn by her since. The ring has not been seen publicly in many years and is presumed to be in storage.
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 important 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.
The Melbourne emerald choker
The most-photographed single moment in the entire history of Diana's jewellery happened in Melbourne in October 1985, when Diana 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.
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. The South African choker — a seven-strand pearl piece given to her by the Queen for her twentieth birthday in 1981 — became her workhorse piece, worn dozens of times over fifteen years.
There were other pearls. 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 set 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 Middleton.
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 dinner at a 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, Diana returned some pieces to the royal collection — most of the gifts that had been formal Crown property — but kept the engagement ring and the pieces she'd bought herself. There were not many of those. The pieces she kept she wore constantly in the year between the divorce and her death.
What was inherited
When Diana died in August 1997, her jewellery was divided between her sons. The major pieces — the engagement ring, the Swan Lake Suite, certain pearl pieces, the items she had bought or commissioned personally — went into trust. State property reverted to the Crown.
Catherine Middleton 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 occasions, and various Diana pearl earrings regularly enough that they have become identified with her rather than with Diana. This is, presumably, the point of inheriting jewellery — at some stage it becomes yours.
Meghan Markle has worn Diana's aquamarine ring (which Diana herself commissioned 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 these pieces after the Sussexes' departure from senior royal duties 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 are likely to emerge again at some point — at a future engagement, or coronation, or state dinner. That's how royal jewellery works. The pieces wait. They are worn by the next person.
A note on what survived
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 constantly — 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 eighteenth-century Spencer Tiara worn while marrying into a family whose own jewellery she could have borrowed.
It's possible to argue that what Diana did with her jewellery was 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 Middleton'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 in a shop on Albemarle Street, on a winter morning forty-five years ago, by a nineteen-year-old who pointed at a page and said that one.
Sources: Garrard archives; Royal Collection Trust public documentation; Christie's auction records; Robert Lacey, ‘Battle of Brothers’ (2020); various contemporary press reports from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and The New Yorker. Photography references: Getty Editorial, PA Images, Royal Collection Trust. Some attributions remain folkloric and have been noted as such in the text.