If there is an international award for the sheer magnificence of its glittering white tie events, on the evidence of tonight’s spread Sweden would bag first prize.
The Nobel Prize Banquet held at Stockholm’s City Hall was a blaze of gold candelabra, rows of hand-tied floral arrangements, and richly attired royals hosting the world’s biggest brains and brightest talent after the Nobel Prize ceremony at the city’s concert hall tonight.
And the women of Sweden’s royal family pulled out all the stops – along with the family jewels – to look their best for the splendid occasion with Crown Princess Victoria, 38, Princess Madeleine, 33, and their sister-in-law Princess Sofia, 30, dusting off the Bernadottes’ most eye-catching tiaras to wear with their floor-length evening gowns.
Stockholm’s City Hall was the vaulting location for the annual Nobel Prize that saw the world’s brightest minds celebrate achievement
Pregnant Crown Princess Victoria showed off her baby bump in an elegant skirt and sheer top, accessorised with the dazzling Connaught Diamond Tiara, as she entered on the arm of Nobel Chemistry Prize 2015 co-winner Canadian Arthur B McDonald wearing white tie and tails
The ceremony was decked out for the occasion with 20,000 white, yellow and orange flowers which were donated by the Italian city of San Remo, where Swedish scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896.
The ten laureates received their Nobel diplomas and gold medals from the hands of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf, in a ceremony interspersed with classical music and presentations by the prize-awarding institutions.
The ceremony took place in front of 1,600 specially-invited guests at Stockholm’s Concert Hall,
China’s Tu Youyou, William Campbell of the US and Satoshi Omura of Japan received the medicine prize for revolutionary treatments of malaria and roundworm.
Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada were given the physics prize for determining that neutrinos have mass.
Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich of the US and Aziz Sancar, a Turkish-American, won the biology prize for work on how cells repair damaged DNA.
Belarussian writer and dissident Svetlana Alexievich was given the literature prize for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.
Poverty expert Angus Deaton, a US-British microeconomist, took home the economics prize for groundbreaking work using household surveys to show how consumers, particularly the poor, decide what to buy and how policymakers can help them.
Each female member of the Swedish royal family descended the sweeping staircase of the vaulting hall on the arm of the Nobel laureates, all clad in white tie and tails.
Crown Princess Victoria entered the ceremony on the arm of the Nobel Chemistry Prize 2015 co-winner Arthur B McDonald.
The pregnant royal, who announced her pregnancy with Prince Daniel in September, wore a flowing dress in a plum shade with a sheer chiffon top.
She topped off her finery with the Connaught Diamond Tiara, which has five distinctive upright loops of forget-me-not wreaths with a diamond pendant suspended in each.
Made by E. Wolff & Co., it was a wedding gift to Princess Margaret of Connaught from her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, when she married Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the future King Gustaf VI Adolf, in 1905.
Queen Silvia wore an asymmetric dress in a ruby-red brocade wearing the Nine Prong Tiara, which is thought to be one of Queen Silvia’s favourite tiaras.
Encrusted with more than 500 diamonds, the headpiece is arranged in a sunburst-type motif that ends in nine graduated prongs.
