Scandal was abuzz in the Twitter-verse following this year’s Met Gala in the Big Apple. This news follows on the heels of a string of similar celebrity controversies that made recent headlines.
May’s event was special because after two long years, pandemic restrictions were finally lifted. Now that things could go back to business as unusual, stars geared-up to make 2022 an extravaganza for the history books.
It was an overall hit with the public, but it wasn’t without its share of controversy. This year’s theme was “Gilded Glamour”—a reference to opulence and excess in New York’s Gilded Age at the turn of the century.
Diamond jewelry takes center stage at the Gala, and this year was no exception. Naomi Campbell was drenched in Jacob & Co jewels. Kate Moss wore a vintage collet necklace, earrings and Cartier ring. But it was Emma Chamberlain’s famous Cartier choker that generated the most buzz, and not all of it was kind.
Chamberlain’s choker harks back to 1928, when it belonged to an Indian prince, the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh. Not present on Chamberlain was its counterpart, the Patiala Necklace itself, featuring a world famous yellow De Beers stone mined in 1888 in South Africa. The collar worn by Chamberlain was part of a set, and is easily recognizable in Maharaja photographs.
James Redding is a period jewelry designer at London’s Vintage Gallery Jewellery. In a telephone interview he explained that there was a public misconception about the center of controversy.
“When people speak of the Maharaja’s famous necklace, most are not in fact referencing the piece being worn by Ms. Chamberlain. It was on this jewelry itself where we find what was the world’s seventh largest diamond.”
Following Singh’s death, the heirloom disappeared from his family’s royal treasury under British rule. In 1998, its large gemstone resurfaced at Sotheby’s, and was acquired by Cartier.
The French jeweler later discovered another missing piece of the scuttled necklace for sale in London, and restored it to appear as the original. Maharaja jewels have important national and historic significance in India, and they are considered plundered loot under occupation by an exploitative, colonialist power.
Vintage diamonds are often a sensitive topic to begin with. In some cases there is legitimate concern over blood diamonds; as well as issues involving theft, colonialism, or exploitation. These areas of controversy have plagued the jewelry industry for years, but a novel solution by an Israeli high-tech company has solved the riddle of knowing a diamond’s provenance.
Sarine Technologies uses hardware, software and blockchain to establish proof of provenance and ownership. Luxury conglomerates like Maison Boucheron use the technology to ensure their products are sustainable and ethical.
Using AI-powered software, a high-resolution imaging device captures a 3D model of a rough jewel at the mine site. The unique crystalline structure of each jewel has its own forensic fingerprint, and together with metadata, it’s all uploaded to Sarine’s cloud database and blockchain.
Each checkpoint of the stone’s journey uses a scanner to verify a fingerprint against the database, and then transit point data is updated on blockchain. Owners are registered in Sarine’s database, and proof of ownership is easily established by a scan of the stone.
Customers know exactly where a stone was ethically sourced, and in the event of a gem being lost or stolen, any store that scans it will instantly know to whom it belongs. Jewels come with a digital report called the Sarine Diamond Journey, which documents the birth of a rough stone and its travels.
Joseph Millstein is a gemstone trader for Regency Collective in Manhattan. In a Zoom interview last week he explained, “For our industry, tracing technology is the most exciting development in decades. Our clients are insisting that certain countries or mines are excluded from our sourcing, and this blockchain tracking solves all of this for us.”
It’s now possible to buy a sustainable natural diamond that is guaranteed to come from a mine with ethical conditions. An irony of the Met’s Gilded Glamour theme is the dark underbelly of that period’s exploitative opulence. A saving grace is that younger generations won’t let it happen again, and now there’s a technology for ensuring that it doesn’t.
