The phrase tutti frutti — Italian for "all fruits" — was applied retrospectively by the trade to describe one of the most distinctive and influential jewellery idioms of the twentieth century: a style pioneered by Cartier in the 1920s and 1930s that combined carved and engraved rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in the forms of leaves, berries, and blossoms, set against pavé-diamond grounds and mounted in platinum. The aesthetic drew directly on the carved gemstone tradition of Mughal India, and Cartier's own archives and contemporary press frequently described these pieces under the heading style hindou — the Hindu style. The convergence of Mughal lapidary heritage with the geometric severity of Art Deco produced jewels of extraordinary chromatic intensity and formal originality, and the finest surviving examples remain among the most sought-after pieces at international auction.

Found your ruby? Our Toronto, Canada atelier will set it in a custom pendant made just for you.

Origins: The Mughal Lapidary Tradition

The carved gemstones at the heart of the tutti frutti style were not made in Paris. They originated in the workshops of Mughal India, where the practice of carving rubies, emeralds, and spinels into floral and foliate forms had flourished from the sixteenth century onward under imperial patronage. The Mughal emperors — particularly Jahangir and Shah Jahan — were passionate collectors of engraved and carved stones, and the lapidary arts reached extraordinary refinement in centres such as Jaipur, Delhi, and Agra. Stones were carved into lotus petals, mango leaves, poppy blossoms, and berry clusters, often pierced for stringing as beads or pendants in the kundan setting tradition, in which pure gold foil is pressed around stones without the use of prongs.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dissolution of Mughal court culture and the dispersal of royal treasuries had placed large quantities of these carved stones on the open market. Indian princes, facing financial pressures or seeking Western-style jewellery, brought their heirlooms to European jewellers. Cartier was exceptionally well positioned to receive them: Louis Cartier, who directed the house from 1898 until his death in 1942, had cultivated relationships with Indian royalty since at least 1901, when the Prince of Wales's visit to India opened new commercial channels. The house maintained a dedicated Indian clientele and, crucially, Louis Cartier himself had developed a deep personal interest in Mughal art and Islamic decorative traditions.

Cartier and the Style Hindou

The precise moment at which Cartier began systematically incorporating Mughal carved stones into Western jewellery settings is difficult to pinpoint exactly, but the practice was well established by the early 1920s. The house acquired carved stones through multiple channels: directly from Indian princes who brought their jewels to Paris or London, through specialist dealers in antique Indian material, and occasionally by dismantling earlier Indian pieces. The stones were then remounted by Cartier's ateliers in Paris, using the platinum-and-diamond vocabulary that the house had done much to establish as the dominant idiom of the Belle Époque and early Art Deco periods.

What distinguished Cartier's approach was the seriousness with which the designers engaged with the source material. Rather than treating the carved stones as mere curiosities to be framed in conventional Western settings, the house developed a coherent design language that allowed the organic, sculptural quality of the Mughal carvings to animate the overall composition. Leaves of carved emerald — often Colombian material that had reached India via the Portuguese trade routes — were arranged in sprays; carved ruby berries clustered in bunches; sapphire blossoms opened against fields of brilliant-cut diamonds. The palette was deliberately rich and contrasting: the deep pigeon-blood red of Burmese rubies against the vivid green of Colombian emeralds, punctuated by the blue of Ceylon or Burmese sapphires and the white brilliance of the diamond ground.

The term style hindou appears in Cartier's own documentation of the period, and the house was explicit in its sources of inspiration. This was not mere orientalism in the superficial sense but a genuine engagement with a specific lapidary tradition, one that Cartier's designers — including Charles Jacqueau, who worked closely with Louis Cartier on the development of the style — studied through direct examination of objects and through the growing scholarly literature on Mughal decorative arts.

Defining Characteristics

A canonical tutti frutti piece in the style hindou typically exhibits the following features:

• Carved and engraved gemstones: Rubies, emeralds, and sapphires carved into leaf, berry, blossom, or melon forms. The carving is generally of Indian origin, often dating to the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, though Cartier occasionally commissioned new carvings to supplement antique material.
• Platinum mounts: The structural framework is almost invariably platinum, the metal that Cartier had championed since the early 1900s for its strength, whiteness, and ability to support minimal, almost invisible settings.
• Pavé and bead-set diamonds: Brilliant-cut and single-cut diamonds fill the ground between the carved stones, providing luminous contrast and structural coherence.
• Calibré-cut coloured stones: Smaller rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, cut to fit specific spaces in the design, supplement the carved elements and reinforce the polychrome effect.
• Foliate and floral composition: The overall design is typically organised around a naturalistic spray, branch, or garland motif, echoing both the Mughal source material and the broader Art Deco interest in stylised natural forms.
• Chromatic intensity: The combination of red, green, and blue against white is the defining visual signature — the "all fruits" quality that gave the style its retrospective trade name.

Notable Commissions and Surviving Pieces

The most celebrated tutti frutti jewels were made for a clientele that included both Western socialites and Indian royalty, reflecting Cartier's unique position as a house that served both worlds simultaneously. Several pieces have achieved landmark status in the history of jewellery.

Browse loose, certified rubies in Toronto, Canada — or book a private viewing to see them in hand.

The Daisy Fellowes necklace of 1936 — known as the "Collier Hindou" — is among the most frequently cited examples. Made for the Hon. Daisy Fellowes, the Paris editor of Harper's Bazaar and one of the great style arbiters of the interwar period, it incorporated a spectacular array of carved rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in a flexible, multi-strand configuration. The piece sold at Christie's Geneva in 1991 and has since entered the collection of the Cartier Collection, where it remains one of the most studied objects in the archive.

Cartier also produced tutti frutti bracelets, brooches, hair ornaments, and vanity cases for clients including the Maharajas of Patiala and Kapurthala, Linda Lee Thomas (wife of Cole Porter), and Edith Rockefeller McCormick. The bracelet form was particularly successful: wide, flexible bands of carved stones set in platinum, worn stacked or singly, became one of the defining luxury accessories of the 1920s.

The Cartier Collection, maintained by the house and exhibited internationally, preserves a significant number of original style hindou pieces and has been the subject of major scholarly exhibitions, including those at the Petit Palais in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Gemmological Significance of the Stones

From a gemmological perspective, the carved stones in tutti frutti jewels present particular interest and particular challenges. The rubies are predominantly of Burmese origin — Mogok material of the type prized for its fluorescent, "pigeon-blood" quality — though Thai and Ceylonese rubies also appear. The emeralds are largely Colombian, having reached India through the Portuguese trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; their characteristic inclusions (the jardin of three-phase inclusions, fluid-filled fractures, and pyrite crystals associated with Colombian origin) are often visible even through the carving. The sapphires are typically Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) or Burmese.

The carved surfaces present complications for modern gemmological assessment. Refractive index measurements are difficult to obtain reliably from curved, facet-free surfaces, and the carving itself may obscure or alter the appearance of inclusions used for origin determination. Spectroscopic methods — particularly UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy and photoluminescence analysis — are now routinely applied by major laboratories including the Gübelin Gem Lab and SSEF to assess origin and treatment status of carved stones. Heat treatment of the rubies and sapphires, and fracture-filling of the emeralds, must be considered in any serious gemmological evaluation, though many of the antique Mughal-carved stones predate the widespread use of modern enhancement techniques.

The provenance of the carved stones themselves — their Mughal origin — is increasingly recognised as a significant component of value, and major auction houses now commission specialist reports on the Indian lapidary heritage of important pieces.

The Trade Name and Its Complications

The term tutti frutti was not used by Cartier itself; it emerged in the trade, most plausibly in the American market, as a colloquial description of the multicoloured, fruit-like appearance of the carved stones. Cartier's own terminology — style hindou, or simply the "Hindu style" — was more precise and more respectful of the actual sources. The retrospective trade name, while now universally understood, carries a certain reductive quality that the house's own documentation does not support.

It should also be noted that Cartier was not the only house working in this idiom: Van Cleef & Arpels, Mauboussin, and other Paris maisons produced pieces incorporating Mughal carved stones during the same period. However, Cartier's output was the most extensive, the most consistently high in quality, and the most influential on subsequent design. The house's name has become effectively synonymous with the style in the auction market and in gemmological literature.

Market and Auction History

Original Cartier tutti frutti pieces of the 1920s and 1930s command exceptional prices at auction, reflecting both their art-historical importance and the rarity of fine Mughal carved stones of this quality. Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams have all offered significant examples in recent decades, with major bracelets and necklaces regularly achieving seven-figure sums. The combination of signed Cartier provenance, documented commission history, original fitted box, and gemmological reports from recognised laboratories significantly enhances value.

The market distinguishes carefully between pieces made with genuinely antique Mughal carved stones and later pieces — including Cartier's own twentieth-century revivals of the style — that incorporate newly carved material. The former carry a premium that reflects their dual status as both Cartier jewels and repositories of Mughal lapidary heritage.

Collector interest has also driven a broader scholarly reassessment of the style hindou as a moment of genuine cross-cultural exchange rather than mere appropriation — a reassessment supported by the documented relationships between Cartier and its Indian clients, the house's serious engagement with Mughal art, and the fact that Indian princes were themselves among the primary commissioners of pieces in this style.

Legacy and Influence

The tutti frutti aesthetic has proven remarkably durable. Cartier has periodically revisited the style in its high jewellery collections, and the vocabulary of carved coloured stones set against diamond grounds has influenced designers across the luxury market. The broader lesson of the style — that the combination of chromatic boldness, sculptural surface, and structural precision can produce jewellery of the highest order — remains as relevant as it was when Louis Cartier and Charles Jacqueau were assembling the first pieces in the early 1920s.

In the history of jewellery, the style hindou occupies a singular position: it is one of the few instances in which a Western jewellery house engaged so deeply with a non-Western lapidary tradition that the result transcended mere influence to become a genuinely new and enduring form. The carved rubies, emeralds, and sapphires that Mughal craftsmen shaped centuries ago found, in Cartier's platinum-and-diamond settings, a second life that has proved as lasting as the first.

Dreaming of a custom pendant? Our Toronto, Canada workshop builds it around an emerald you choose.

Further Reading

• Gems & Gemology — Cartier and the Tutti Frutti Style (GIA)
• GIA Research: The Cartier Collection