One hundred years ago, the Maison de Cartier brought their Gallic glitter and glamour to our shores, opening their first stateside location in New York City. The launch—the first for a French jeweler in the city—certainly made life easier for American millionaires, who used to make regular pilgrimages to the Paris shop. Cartier’s temps-perdu client list could actually serve as a guide to the history of money and celebrity in the United States: Heiresses Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke were regulars, as were other society names such as Evalyn Walsh McLean, who bought both the 94.80-carat Star of the East and the infamous 45.50- carat Hope diamond from cartier calibre replica uk (often wearing them at the same time). Several generations of big-spending Vanderbilts plus a Gould or two were also devotees. Café society was well represented by Cole and Linda Porter, interior-design socialite Elsie de Wolfe and trendsetters Babe Paley and Daisy Fellowes, while American women of fame and/or fortune who latched onto European royal titles, such as Nancy Leeds, Wallis Simpson, Grace Kelly and Mona Bismarck, were also fans.
Hollywood royalty who were tag heuer replica uk enthusiasts included the likes of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Gloria Swanson (whose trinkets may have been supplied by her longtime “friend” Joseph Kennedy. His daughter-in-law Jackie was of course also a Cartier client). Since 1926—when Rudolph Valentino appeared in The Son of the Sheik wearing a Cartier Tank watch—the house also had a presence on the silver screen. Whenever a film about living large was made, Cartier often had a semi-starring role, as it did in the unforgettable scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat when Tallulah Bankhead offered her diamond bracelet as fish lure, uttering, “Sure, we have bait—by http://www.nalumar.com/ulysse-nardin-replica-uk.html.” Although most of Cartier’s on-screen jewels were whisked back to the vaults or bought by the stars who them, the 58 pieces shared by Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles in the 1974 film The Great Gatsby were actually purchased by the producers for what was rumored to be $5 million.