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Designed by Mike Stillwell
At the center of the plot of the new Downton AbbeThe film is a royal visit. Above and below, the inhabitants of our favorite British fictional area are moved by the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. The protocol requires a lot of cleaning and tuning, but all efforts are rewarded with a big party properly completed with diadems.
And not any tiara – Queen Mary (the grandmother of the current Queen) is wearing the famous Vladimir Tiara, who would be one of her granddaughter's favorites.
I have often said that the story of Vladimir's tiara was worthy of a James Bond movie. Hidden in a wall of a palace in St. Petersburg, where he would be safe during the Russian Revolution, then secretly smuggled out of Russia – by British intelligence officers dressed as laborers or old ladies, according to the narrative that you believe. Whatever disguise was used to save this Romanov gem, it really worked.
Vladimir's diadem came out of Russia – perhaps the last treasure to do it – and into the hands of the children of the Grand Duchess Vladimir in 1921. However, at the time, they needed more than They were sold to Queen Mary (who could never have enough). Shortly after the acquisition of the tiara (and five years before the action of the Downton Abbey movie)Mary decided she needed a bit of redesign; he also needs a repair; to escape Bolshevik revolutionaries can be difficult on a rock.
She had it redone so that the pearls could be exchanged for her collection of Cambridge Emerald Drops when she was seized by the urge to go green. She used 15 famous jewels to effect the change.
These stones, which were part of a lottery hideaway by her grandmother, the first Duchess of Cambridge, almost left the royal family forever, when Queen Mary's brother bequeathed them to her mistress. Queen Mary is quickly busy with this.
And so, while you watch the Downton Abbey filming and attending a fictitious royal visit of Queen Mary and King George to Downton Abbey in 1927, focused on her emerald diadem and diamond Vladimir, as well as on the Delhi Duhrbar necklace and suite, also created with Cambridge Emeralds. These real royal jewels have been painstakingly reproduced under the eyes of Downton's costume designer. Anna Robbins. She said T & C how did all this happen and comment in detail on how to make a copy of one of the Queen's favorite tiaras.
There are great jewels in the royal chests. How did you choose Vladimir?
For all the royal jewels described in the film, we wanted pieces that our current audience could recognize, but that also worked in terms of style and proportion for costumes. We took care to choose the pieces which belonged and which were in possession of the represented characters wearing them at the time.
How do you copy?
The replicas of royal jewels were made by my model maker Martin Adams. It was a painstaking process of doing each one as faithfully as possible and took several hours.
Should the queen say OK?
As in the movie, we followed a customs clearance process for anything that might require authorization. It turned out that we did not need a specific permission to recreate these pieces.
So, really, how does the Vladimir in the film compare to reality?
When it is equipped with its emerald pendants, Vladimir's tiara is part of a jewelery set collectively called the Cambridge Emeralds, which includes for the tiara, necklace, curls, earrings and more. ears, bracelet and brooch. The tiara is composed of fifteen intersecting circular elements, fixed on a base ring and connected by an undulating ring, all molded in lead – free tin, mounted and galvanized to silver. Swarovski stones on aluminum back represent diamonds.
For this version of the tiara, the circles are set with a total of just over 370 main stones, the base ring with about 92 units, and the "waves" are set with about 150 units. They range from 8 mm in diameter to 3 mm. In the original tiara, there are tiny stones that fill the spaces where each circular stone meets its neighbor and range from 2 mm in diameter to less than half a millimeter in diameter. In the whole of the tiara, they total about 1200 additional stones. In my version, for reasons of expense, and because the tiara would not be seen in extreme close-ups, there is only about a quarter of those little extra stones.
The fifteen "emerald" pendants are melted in pigmented epoxy resin and polished to a brilliant shine. These are mounted in "caps" made of tin and plated (also set with Swarovski stones, for a total of about 180) that are related to the tiara so that they can be hanging freely in the circles of the diadem. Estimated total number of stones in the original: about 1,900. Estimated total number of stones in my version: about 1,100.
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