Marguerite Séverine Philippine Decazes de Glücksberg, universally known as Daisy Fellowes (1890–1962), occupies a singular position in the history of jewellery. She was not a designer, a gemmologist, or a jeweller, yet her influence on the aesthetic of the Art Deco period — and on the coloured-gemstone jewels that define it — was profound and lasting. As one of the most consequential private clients Cartier has ever served, she commissioned, wore, and inspired pieces that remain benchmarks of the Tutti Frutti style: that extraordinary synthesis of Mughal carved gemstones, Parisian platinum-and-diamond setting, and a chromatic boldness that no other era has quite replicated. Her jewels have since passed through the world's leading auction rooms, commanding prices that confirm their status not merely as personal ornaments but as cultural artefacts of the first order.

Origins and Social Position

Daisy Fellowes was born into two of the most formidable fortunes of the late nineteenth century. Her mother, Isabelle-Blanche Singer, was the daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer, founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, whose industrial wealth was among the largest in America. Her father was the fourth Duc Decazes, a French aristocrat of the old regime. This double inheritance — American money and European title — placed Daisy at the intersection of two worlds that were, in the early twentieth century, still negotiating their relationship with one another. She was educated in France, moved effortlessly between Paris, London, and the great houses of the English countryside, and married three times: first to Prince Jean de Broglie, then to the Hon. Reginald Fellowes (a cousin of Winston Churchill), and finally, briefly, to Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge.

Her social position was reinforced by her editorship of Harper's Bazaar in France during the 1930s, a role that formalised what had long been evident: she was a tastemaker of international consequence. Cecil Beaton photographed her; Evelyn Waugh caricatured her (as the merciless Mrs Beste-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall); Elsa Schiaparelli dressed her. She was, by most contemporary accounts, as formidable as she was elegant — a woman whose wit was described by those who encountered it as frequently devastating.

The Cartier Relationship

Daisy Fellowes's relationship with Cartier was not that of a passive customer selecting from existing stock. It was a creative collaboration, conducted over decades, in which her appetite for the unusual pushed the house's designers — working under the direction of Louis Cartier and later his son Claude — toward ever more ambitious conceptions. She was among the earliest and most committed champions of what Cartier called the style hindou, and what the trade would later popularise as Tutti Frutti: jewels incorporating carved and cabochon rubies, emeralds, and sapphires of Indian origin, set in platinum with brilliant-cut and baguette diamonds.

The aesthetic had its roots in Cartier's direct engagement with the Indian market and with the Mughal tradition of gem carving, which the house had been exploring since at least the first decade of the twentieth century. Louis Cartier had travelled to India, studied Mughal jewels, and begun acquiring carved stones — emeralds incised with floral and foliate motifs, rubies shaped as leaves and berries, sapphires cut as blossoms — that could be reinterpreted within a Western setting vocabulary. The challenge was to honour the chromatic intensity and the carving tradition of the original stones while embedding them in the geometric rigour of Art Deco design. Daisy Fellowes, with her Franco-American sensibility and her absolute refusal of timidity, was the ideal patron for this experiment.

The Tutti Frutti Necklace

The most celebrated object associated with Daisy Fellowes is the Tutti Frutti necklace that Cartier created for her in 1936. This piece — sometimes described simply as the Daisy Fellowes necklace, as though no further specification were required — is among the most important jewels of the twentieth century. It comprises a sinuous, flexible structure of carved emerald leaves, ruby berries, and sapphire blossoms, all set in platinum with diamond accents, arranged so that the necklace moves with the body and presents a continuously shifting composition of colour. The stones are of Indian origin, the emeralds showing the characteristic inclusions — the jardin — of Colombian material that had passed through the Mughal lapidary tradition, the rubies and sapphires carved with the fluid naturalism that distinguishes Mughal gem-cutting from its European equivalents.

The necklace was not simply a commission fulfilled to a client's specification; it was, by all accounts, the product of sustained dialogue between Fellowes and Cartier's atelier. She wore it with the theatrical confidence that the piece demanded, and it became one of the defining images of interwar jewellery — a moment when the coloured gemstone, rather than the diamond, was the supreme expression of luxury and sophistication.

The necklace subsequently passed through private hands before appearing at auction. It was sold at Christie's Geneva in 1991, and again at Christie's New York in 2012, where it achieved a price of approximately $3.7 million, confirming its standing as one of the most valuable Art Deco jewels ever to appear on the open market. It is now in a private collection.

Other Major Commissions

The 1936 necklace, though the most famous, was not Fellowes's only significant commission from Cartier. She also owned a series of Tutti Frutti bracelets — wide, flexible bands of carved rubies, emeralds, and sapphires set in platinum and diamonds — that were characteristic of the style at its most exuberant. These bracelets were typically worn stacked, a practice that Fellowes adopted with the same deliberate theatricality she brought to all her self-presentation. The cumulative effect of multiple such bracelets worn simultaneously was one of almost barbaric richness, an effect that was entirely intentional: Fellowes understood that jewellery at this scale was not ornament but statement.

She also commissioned pieces in other idioms — Cartier's output in the 1920s and 1930s was stylistically diverse, encompassing the geometric abstraction of pure Art Deco, the Egyptian Revival prompted by the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, and the Chinese-inspired lacquer and jade work that reflected the period's broader Orientalist enthusiasms. Fellowes moved across these styles with ease, but it is the Indian-inflected Tutti Frutti pieces with which she is most lastingly identified.

Gemmological Significance of the Stones

The coloured gemstones in Daisy Fellowes's major Cartier pieces deserve consideration in their own right, independent of their setting. The emeralds in the Tutti Frutti necklace and bracelets are, in the main, Colombian stones of significant size and quality — material that would have been mined in the Muzo or Chivor regions of Colombia, traded westward through Goa and Surat, and eventually carved by Mughal lapidaries in workshops that flourished under the patronage of the Mughal emperors from the sixteenth century onward. The carving tradition imposed a particular aesthetic on the stones: foliate forms, floral motifs, occasionally calligraphic inscriptions, all executed with a precision that required both exceptional skill and stones of sufficient clarity and size to survive the carving process without fracture.

The rubies in these pieces are predominantly Burmese — from the Mogok Valley, the source that has historically defined the standard for the species — and the sapphires are likely of Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) or Burmese origin. All three species were available to Cartier through the Indian trade, and the house had developed, by the 1920s, a sophisticated network of suppliers who could provide carved stones of the quality that its most demanding clients required.

From a modern gemmological perspective, the stones in Fellowes's major pieces would be of considerable interest to any laboratory asked to examine them. Emeralds of Colombian origin that have passed through the Mughal carving tradition are, by definition, antique stones unlikely to have been subjected to the modern filling treatments — typically with resins or oils — that are now routine in the trade. Their inclusions, their surface characteristics, and their provenance would all be of interest to a laboratory such as the GIA or Gübelin, and any major auction appearance would now be accompanied by detailed laboratory reports addressing origin, treatment status, and, where possible, provenance documentation.

Legacy and Auction History

Daisy Fellowes died in 1962, and her jewels dispersed over the following decades through private sales and auction. The appearance of her pieces at major sales has consistently attracted significant attention, both because of their intrinsic quality and because of the biographical and historical associations they carry. The 1991 and 2012 Christie's sales of the Tutti Frutti necklace were landmark events in the auction history of Art Deco jewellery, and the prices achieved reflected not only the quality of the stones and the craftsmanship of the setting but the premium that the market attaches to documented provenance of this kind.

The broader legacy of Fellowes's patronage is visible in the continuing prestige of the Tutti Frutti style itself. Cartier has returned to the idiom repeatedly in its high jewellery collections, and the carved Indian gemstone — once a relatively specialised taste — has become one of the most sought-after categories in the coloured-gemstone market. Auction houses regularly present carved Mughal emeralds, rubies, and sapphires as standalone lots, and the prices they achieve reflect a market that has been, in part, educated by the visibility of pieces like those Fellowes commissioned and wore.

Her influence is also felt in the way that the relationship between client and jeweller is now understood. The model she exemplified — the informed, opinionated patron who participates actively in the creative process rather than simply selecting from existing inventory — is one that the major jewellery houses now actively cultivate in their high jewellery ateliers. Fellowes was not the only client to work in this way, but she was among the most consequential, and the pieces that resulted from her collaboration with Cartier are among the most enduring evidence of what that model can produce.

Character and Reputation

Any account of Daisy Fellowes that confined itself to her jewels would be incomplete. She was a figure of considerable complexity — generous to some, formidable to many, and possessed of a social intelligence that her contemporaries found both admirable and alarming. Her wit was documented by multiple memoirists of the period, and her capacity for social cruelty was equally noted. She was, in the language of her era, a grande dame of a particularly uncompromising variety: a woman who had inherited great wealth, augmented it through marriage, and deployed both with an assurance that admitted no self-doubt.

This assurance extended to her jewels. She wore pieces that lesser personalities might have found overwhelming, and she wore them as though they were the most natural thing in the world. The Tutti Frutti necklace, with its cascading carved stones and its chromatic intensity, required a certain kind of presence to carry — and Fellowes possessed that presence in abundance. It is, perhaps, this quality above all others that explains why her name remains attached to the style: the jewels and the woman were, in a sense, co-constitutive, each making the other more fully itself.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Cartier and the Tutti Frutti Style
• GIA Gems & Gemology — Mughal Emeralds