The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the depression that followed transformed the conditions under which luxury goods could be sold in ways that took years to fully work through. For Cartier, whose New York branch under Pierre Cartier had built its position substantially on American wealth, the collapse of that wealth required a rapid and sustained rethinking of what the firm could sell, to whom, and at what price.
The most immediate and lasting casualty was the natural pearl market. Natural pearls had been among the most valuable portable objects available to wealthy buyers for centuries, and Cartier had traded in them extensively since the 1890s. Pierre Cartier's most celebrated transaction, the exchange of a double-strand natural pearl necklace for a Fifth Avenue mansion, had taken place in 1917, at the height of the pearl market. But the Depression coincided with the commercial introduction of the cultured pearl, which had the same optical properties as a natural pearl and could be produced in quantity. The combination of economic collapse and technological disruption ended the natural pearl's place at the summit of the jewellery market within a few years. Values fell sharply and did not recover. The strand of pearls that had bought the Cartier New York premises would not have done so a decade later.
The firm adapted. Pieces became smaller and, in some cases, more versatile. The convertible jewellery tradition, which allowed a single piece to be worn in multiple configurations, became more commercially significant when clients could no longer justify a different piece for every occasion. Design continued to evolve: the Art Deco aesthetic of the 1930s, while related to the 1920s version, took on harder lines and less extravagant scale in part because the market demanded it.
A small number of wealthy clients continued to commission at scale throughout the 1930s. Barbara Hutton and Marjorie Merriweather Post remained significant buyers, and the dispossessed European aristocracy, selling pieces they could no longer maintain, provided a secondary market that Cartier continued to participate in. But the general conditions for the trade had fundamentally changed, and the firm that emerged from the Depression was operating in a different world from the one that had entered it.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 8 ("Diamonds and Depression: The 1930s")
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), p. 253.
- Wikipedia: The Great Depression and Cartier
