The oracle of the “reptile” style according to Cartier
“They admired my beauty and intelligence, I was only a woman with the heart of a man. A warrior.” María Félix One of Cartier’s faithful customers, a character of legend and cinema whose wild beauty was depicted to perfection in black and white, her appearances enflamed both hearts and imaginations. With glowing eyes, jet-black hair, lips outlined in red and the longest hands, she did everything with passion. A lover of love, at 28, she was the most famous Latin-American actress in the world.
Maria Felix The home of this half-Indian, half-Spanish star, known for her spectacular jewellery, boasted a flamboyant baroque-style interior, with swan-neck taps and all-gold scales in her bathroom, a whim which she asked Cartier to create. Her taste was for the tailormade product, the nonconformist object that suddenly transformed everyday articles into extremely precious items. Her true accomplice, Cartier took such pride in the diva’s fantastical jewelry that years later, the jeweller purchased them to include them in the Collection Cartier. Special features of the Cartier heritage, like Gloria Swanson’s crystal bracelets or Barbara Hutton’s tigers, they are now part of a historic collection displayed in the greatest museums around the world. In 1999 at the Muséo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico, María Félix, the guest of honor at the exhibition Resplendor del tiempo, took part, visibly touched, in the spectacular staging of her animals. Following in the wake of the Duchess of Windsor, Daisy Fellowes, Elisabeth Taylor or Jacqueline Delubac, María Félix was one of those women who invented their own style, with María leaving her famous look in the hands of Cartier.
The crocodile, the star’s iconic talisman “Her animals”; this is what she called her bejewelled mascots which were part of her animal collection, including the crocodile which remained her iconic talisman, a sacred reptile in Egypt, and the symbol of death and rebirth for the Aztecs. She wore it around her neck, and had a double of this extravagant necklace made by Cartier in 1975. A work larger than life was drawn, created and set based on the original, when the star visited Cartier along with a live baby crocodile in a jar and insisted that a miniature jewelled version of the reptile be made as quickly as possible, as the original never stopped growing! Cartier rose to the occasion-it was not the master of the largest jewelry animal collection for nothing-and shaped María’s dreams in the form of a beast lying in wait. Head, tail, and feet were articulated, its eyes glowed with life, with 1,023 jonquille diamonds for one and 1,066 emeralds for the other. She loved it and wore it as a symbol of exuberance and freedom, representing elegance pushed to its limits, and accompanied by a red cape and black sombrero.
Source: Google Imagen, thewatchquote.
