Alfred Durante (1937–2022) grew up in Brooklyn and joined Cartier New York in the 1950s, when the firm was still family-owned and the design studio occupied the upper floors of the Fifth Avenue showroom. At interview, aged sixteen, he submitted a flower brooch sketch. He was hired.
His training was with French-trained designers who had been part of the firm's craft tradition for decades. He described growing up in that studio as an education in the standards Cartier expected: materials, proportion, construction. Among those he designed for were the Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. "To say I was intimidated at first would be putting it mildly," he recalled.
He worked with Claude Cartier, the son of Louis Cartier, who ran the New York branch in its final family years; the branch was sold in 1962. Durante eventually rose to Vice President of Design and Production before leaving to work as an independent designer.
He had known the Cartier family first-hand across several generations, and his recollections of those years (of the French designers who trained him, of the clients who came through the Fifth Avenue showroom, of the internal life of the firm before its sale) were a direct source for the research behind The Cartiers.
He died in 2022 at the age of eighty-five.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 10 (“Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956”) and ch. 11 (“The End of an Era, 1957–1974”)
- Ashley Davis, “Jewelry Designer and Artist Alfred Durante Dies,” National Jeweler, 10 February 2022
- Rob Bates, “Cartier Designer Alfred Durante Dies,” JCK Online, 15 February 2022
