For her Met Gala 2022 red carpet look, American YouTuber Emma Chamberlain wore a piece of jewellery that belonged to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. Wearing an antique piece of jewellery to the fashion event certainly left many netizens miffed. So, why Chamberlain’s style statement has created a storm on the internet?
Blame European imperialism for Chamberlain’s infamous Met Gala moment. The 20-year-old wore the diamond choker lent by French jewellery house Cartier. The choker originally belonged to the Maharaja of Patiala Bhupinder Singh and it was made in 1928 after the Punjab royal decided to turn his De Beers diamond, the seventh-largest in the world into an heirloom choker.
The necklace came to be known as the Patiala Necklace and includes five rows of platinum chains embellished with 2,930 diamonds and some Burmese rubies. The Patiala royal had reached out to Cartier to design his gemstones and diamonds into the choker as it is seen today. According to The Tribune, the necklace weighed over a thousand carats and at its centre was the yellow 234.6-carat De Beers diamond, the size of a golf ball and the seventh-largest diamond in the world.
However, the Patiala necklace project did not actually end up being financially that attractive for Cartier, primarily because the Maharaja supplied most of his own gemstones. But it did enhance Cartier’s image in the West. As Jacques Cartier visited India and inspected Indian rulers’ spectacular gemstone collections, he presented a world of luxury to the west that was not seen before. When Cartier displayed Maharaja Bhupinder Singh’s jewellery collection at an exhibition on 13 Rue de la Paix, visitors from all over the world gathered at the venue to see them.
However, in 1948, the necklace was reported missing from the Patiala royal treasury. After 34 years the De Beers diamond mysteriously reappeared, without the necklace, at a 1982 Sotheby’s auction. At the time, it was valued at $3 million. 16 years later, part of the necklace appeared in a small antiques shop in London, sans the De Beers stone and all the other big diamonds. The necklace was then bought by Cartier, who replaced the missing stones with replicas. It is believed that if the Patiala necklace was in its original form today, it would have been worth at least $30 million.