Marlene Dietrich (27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German-American actress who became one of the defining international film stars of the 1930s. Her career intersected with Cartier's story during the period when the firm was actively seeking to attract Hollywood clients as a new and influential category.
The Cartiers were not blind to the growing influence of motion picture celebrities. As the Golden Age of Hollywood took hold in the 1930s, actors and actresses became international celebrities of a new kind, and their choices in clothing and jewellery were noted and copied. Cartier Paris was keen to draw them through the doors of 13 rue de la Paix.
The Cartier Connection
Dietrich came to Cartier Paris through an introduction involving the actor Douglas Fairbanks and a young American salesman named Jack Hasey. The full story of how Hasey's quick thinking turned a routine delivery into one of Cartier's most high-profile client relationships is told in The Cartiers, ch. 8.
Dietrich appears in accounts of Cartier's interwar clientele alongside the Duchess of Windsor as one of the most prominent names attached to certain streamlined 1930s designs. A 1930s Vogue photograph records her wearing Cartier silver earrings with yellow gold balls alongside a modernist Cartier cuff bracelet. The combination of her personal style and her extraordinary public profile made her name useful to the firm in ways that went beyond any single purchase.
Cartier in the 1930s
The decade in which Dietrich became a Cartier client was one in which Louis Cartier was rethinking what jewellery could look like. Under the pressure of the Depression and changing fashion, designs that focused on streamlined geometry rather than the abundance of coloured gemstones that had characterised the 1920s came to the fore. These pieces, which could appear bold in a different way, were described as popular with "trendsetting clients, including Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor."
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 8 ("Diamonds and Depression: The 1930s")
- Wikipedia: Marlene Dietrich
