Lucien Lachassagne was a French designer at Cartier Paris during and after the Second World War. He was part of the small senior cohort that carried the house's high jewellery through the wartime years and into the post-war revival, working from the bureau d'études on 13 Rue de la Paix under Jeanne Toussaint and alongside Georges Rémy and Pierre Lemarchand. For much of his career he and Rémy shared an office in the Paris design studio.
The Hutton Emerald Headdress
The piece for which Lachassagne is best remembered is a post-war reworking of Barbara Hutton's Romanov emeralds: the Colombian stones that had once belonged to Russia's Grand Duchess Vladimir and had already passed through Cartier's hands more than once before, on two different continents. By the late 1950s Hutton was living in Paris and called on her favourite Cartier salesman, André Denet, for another reset, this time with the parties at her Tangier palace in mind. Lachassagne designed her an oriental-style necklace that could double as a tiara, worn high on the head. Photographs from Sidi Hosni in 1961 show her receiving guests in a sari with the headdress on.
The fuller arc of those emeralds, from St Petersburg via Cartier New York and London to Tangier, and onward to Van Cleef & Arpels when Hutton finally let them go in the 1960s, is told in The Cartiers, ch. 7.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), pp. 266, 461, 507
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007)
- Macklowe Gallery, "Highlighting Women Makers: Jeanne Toussaint and Cartier's Preeminent Jewels"
