27/08/2026
✨💖ROYAL TREASURES : The Patiala Diamond Choker
A jewel once seen at the throat of Patiala royalty reappeared almost a century later beneath the lights of New York’s Met Gala.
In the 1920s, Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala entrusted extraordinary gemstones to Cartier. The relationship produced Cartier’s monumental 1928 Patiala Necklace: 2,930 diamonds built around the 234.49-carat yellow De Beers diamond.
Archival photographs later show his son and successor, Maharaja Yadavindra Singh, wearing the great necklace together with a close-fitting diamond choker. In 2022, Emma Chamberlain appeared at the Met Gala wearing a Cartier geometric choker of linked white-diamond circles enclosing remarkable yellow diamonds. Cartier confirms her necklace was set with yellow and white diamonds; Natural Diamond Council identifies it as a historic choker believed to have belonged to the Maharaja of Patiala.
But one mystery remains. The Patiala jewels disappeared from clear documentation around 1948, and the exact journey of this choker into Cartier’s custody has never been publicly established. Historians caution that only Cartier’s archives could finally prove whether the Met Gala jewel is the original Patiala choker, a separately commissioned Patiala piece, or a later reconstruction.
Its beauty survives; its complete provenance does not.
AI-assisted visual reconstruction. Not an archival photograph🤩
