From “ CARTIER “ with love!
Piece by Cartier, Daisy Fellowes’ Tutti Frutti necklace! Cartier’s brightly colored Indian-style jewels of the 1920s and 30s weren’t given the “Tutti Frutti” name until the 1970s.
At the time, they were known simply as ‘pierres de couleur’ (colored stones) although Jacques Cartier [who ran Cartier London and often traveled to India in the 1920s and 1930s] also referred to them as “Hindou jewels.” Daisy Fellowes, the heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, was a celebrated society figure, admired and feared in equal measure. She was a fashion icon but she could also be cruel, said to have a wicked wit and a penchant for “cocaine and other women’s husbands.”
In 1936 Daisy commissioned the Collier Hindou, perhaps the most spectacular example of Cartier’s Tutti Frutti style. Reconstructed from Fellowes’s own carved sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and diamonds, the necklace was unique both in terms of the sheer number of stones and for its ingeniously flexible design. And, as with many jewels of the period, it was multipurpose: the central part of the necklace (formed from two large carved sapphire buds, diamond-studded emerald beads, carved ruby leaves, and navette diamonds) doubled as a removable clip brooch.
After Daisy Fellowes’s death, the necklace passed to her eldest daughter, the Comtesse de Castéja, who took it back to Cartier to be altered in 1963. In 1991, five years after the death of Castéja, the spectacular necklace, along with a pair of carved emerald and diamond earrings, came up for sale with an estimate of $650,000 – $950,000. When the hammer came down at the Sotheby’s Geneva auction, a new record was set for an Art Deco jewel. The final price was $2,655,172. Lately Queen Maxima has been seen sporting her own version of the Tutti Frutti, but the jewelry experts quickly dismissed it as a copy (albeit with real stones!) of the original pieces. And then Cartier did a special collection of the Tutti Frutti a few years....but the prices were prohibitive
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