Few of jewelry’s familiar names came from a place. The Tutti Frutti did. Jacques Cartier’s 1911 visit to Mughal India brought him into rooms where carved emeralds, rubies, and sapphires were not yet rarities — they were heirlooms. He bought what he could; he commissioned what he could not. Back in Paris, the house worked the carved stones into pieces that did not look like anything Western jewelry had previously been allowed to look like.
The early Tutti Frutti pieces — the Hindu necklace of 1936, the Collier Bérénice — are now in museums. The pieces of the 1950s and 1960s, like the bracelet in our latest edit, are the period when the language matured: still exuberant, but composed.
What to look for
A Tutti Frutti piece can be told from its imitations by three things. The first is the carving: authentic Mughal-cut stones (or French re-cuts of the period) have a hand quality no machine yet duplicates. The second is the platinum lacework: at magnification, the openwork is irregular in the right way — a craftsman, not a die. The third is the hallmark, in our case a Cartier Paris stamp and the maker’s mark of the Atelier Renaud.
The bracelet in our Etiler atelier this month (serial 7K3M9P) carries all three.