The King Tut–Inspired Gemstones Even Museums Can’t Afford

posted on: Jun 21, 2015

It couldn’t have been easy to stand out among all the flapper fringe of the Roaring 20s, but Linda Lee Porter, wife of the iconic Broadway composer Cole Porter, pulled it off with a single belt buckle.

Mrs. Porter commissioned Cartier to create a scarab-beetle-shaped buckle brooch (it’s on the far right in the image above) inspired by the ancient Egyptian treasures unearthed with King Tutankhamen’s tomb three years earlier, in 1923. Unlike costume-jewelry copycats, and even fine pieces imitating the loot from the boy king’s tomb, hers was made from actual ancient Egyptian artifacts—namely, faience (glazed ceramic, often blue-green) culled from Louis Cartier’s collection. For good measure, Cartier set it with diamonds and sapphires in the fresh art-deco style of the time.

Vogue raved about the statement piece in a 1927 article titled “Paris Jewellery,” calling it an “unusual buckle in deep lapis-blue.” A year later, at a party thrown by gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, Mrs. Porter was “admired for a sapphire blue satin dress designed especially to show off a huge lapis blue scarab set with two old faience turquoise wings,” according to a 1967 biography of her husband.

Source: www.vanityfair.com