Georgian Jewelry: Aigrettes
- Heather Moll
- Apr 12
- 2 min read
I always enjoy working Georgian jewelry into a book. Sometimes it’s a thoughtful gift, and often that gift ties in to a theme of the story. And other times, in the process of searching out jewelry while I’m plotting, that piece of jewelry ends up being a plot point. In A Most Natural Consequence, a meaningful gift and a plot point came together with a diamond aigrette.
An aigrette is a hair ornament designed to hold or depict feathers and is usually jewel encrusted. Aigrette is the French word for egret, a large water bird with long, fine feathers that originally were used as ornaments themselves.
They first became fashionable in Europe around 1600, when it was worn on hats by men, either to fasten a plume of feathers or to take the place of feathers by having the aigrette in the form of gem-set feathers. The fashion may have come from the Ottoman empire’s influence reaching Europe at this time or partly because of direct contact with the Mughal court in India. Eventually, civilian men ceased wearing aigrettes, and aigrettes shifted to ornaments for military hats and caps. But upper-class women in France took the aigrette as an embellishment for their elaborate hairstyles.
These intricate jeweled aigrettes were made to be worn on their own, without the addition of real feathers. Others were made in feather-like shapes, and still embellished with real feathers as well. And even after tall and intricate wigs and hairstyles went out of fashion, aigrettes remained popular with regency ladies, although the actually feathers were no longer used.
Though tiaras and Spanish combs were the most formal hair ornaments for evening, aigrettes gradually became the preference among those who preferred a less ostentatious and lighter hair ornament.
They didn’t have to be worn high in the center of the head like in this portrait of Maria Luisa. They were often mounted en tremblant, meaning “to tremble”. The diamond pieces were attached to something that acts as a spring, like a thin metal wire, to create movement when worn. En tremblant was typically used in brooches, but was also popular in aigrettes.
Jeweled aigrettes were listed in royal collections at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. During the 18th century, they were popular with upper class European women, who wore them in their intricate wigs and hairstyles before they were used to ornament the sleeker, simpler upswept styles of the early nineteenth century. Then they fell out of style, and many aigrettes were converted to brooches. But there was a resurgence in the late Edwardian era when aigrettes, often with a small real feather, were worn on short hairstyles with a bandeau or a tiara.
Read A Most Natural Consequence to see how Elizabeth acquires one of these pieces and what happens to it after she does.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
I have some feathered pins, all are vintage, but I'm not sure if the oldest ones would have been used for hair. A couple are mid-20th century, but the others are definitely 1800s antique.
I love the idea of an aigrette. I would appreciate seeing how they were secured in the hair to keep from falling out.