The Tiara Problem: Why Britain's Grandest Headpieces Stay in the Safe
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There was a time, not so very long ago, when a ball without tiaras was rather like a ball without champagne: technically possible, but spiritually impoverished. Yet venture into any great ballroom today, and nowhere more so than in Britain, and you will find the guests' heads conspicuously, almost defiantly, bare. What became of all those glittering confections of diamonds and pearls?
There are three reasons you don't see tiaras often at balls anymore: spins, snobbery, and spending.
As a reeling ball chairperson said recently, "The overhead turn has killed the tiara". Anyone who has danced a reel with any degree of enthusiasm will understand the problem immediately. This is true of all balls, but especially so at reeling and other fast dances, where the overhead turn, that moment when a gentleman raises his lady's hand and spins her above her head, places extraordinary demands on the relationship between tiara and hairpin. The issue is not that the piece goes flying. It is that the hair goes with it. A sharp pull at the root, mid-spin, in a crowded marquee in Perthshire, is the kind of thing that rather takes the shine off an otherwise excellent evening. The laws of physics, it turns out, are not suspended merely because one is wearing white tie.
Then there is the rather delicate matter of provenance.
In Britain, and particularly in Scotland, the unspoken rule runs something like this: a tiara is perfectly acceptable, provided it belonged to your grandmother. Ideally her grandmother. To arrive in something recently acquired is to invite a particular kind of sideways glance, the suggestion that one is *trying*, which in these circles remains the one thing never quite forgiven. The tiara must look as though it arrived with the house, not with the credit card statement.
We at Ballavimus believe this is nonsense.
All tiaras were new once. The duchess whose heirloom piece is so approvingly admired had an ancestress who commissioned it, paid for it, and wore it for the first time with precisely the same mixture of excitement and mild anxiety. The idea that jewellery only becomes legitimate after a century in the family vault is, at its heart, simply the establishment pulling the drawbridge up behind them.
The practical reality, however, is rather more prosaic: For most of the modern ball-goer, the question of tiaras is settled less by social anxiety than by simple arithmetic. A genuine diamond tiara represents a serious capital outlay, and that is before one considers the insurance, the storage, and the very real possibility of it meeting its end on the floor of a marquee. The number of people who can both afford a real one and cheerfully risk it on a ballroom dance floor is, in truth, rather small.
And so the great pieces stay in their velvet boxes, brought out for coronations and the occasional portrait sitting, while the rest of us take to the floor with pinned hair alone. One can't help feeling that's a shame. Balls were made for sparkle, and the rules governing where that sparkle must come from are considerably less distinguished than they like to pretend. So our own view is this: If you feel you want to wear a tiara, we say go for it. They are often beautiful things and the world, and even most ballrooms, could do with more beauty.
Just make sure to insure it first!