Does Cartier Control the Aesthetics of Erasure?

The Romance of Stolen Objects

Margot Robbie, the newest portrayal of Catherine Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s contentious adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2026), stepped onto the red carpet on January 28, 2026 wearing the Taj Mahal diamond–a jewel chartered by Cartier to the Aussie star. When asked about the jewel, she named it as Elizabeth Taylor’s: romantic and fitting for the premiere. On the surface, this sounds like reverence. The problem, however, is not what was said, but what was omitted. When only a certain part of history gets to be remembered, it becomes the reclusive portrayal that matters.

The recognition by Robbie met outrage because the ornament had an inscription in Parsee that declared ‘Love is everlasting’ with the name of Nur Jahan–the first woman to whom the jewellery belonged. Before it represented a Hollywood love story, it was a Mughal heirloom. 

There is debate circling the origins of it ever since its acquisition by Cartier, and later its purchase by Richard Burton for his wife Elizabeth Taylor on her fortieth birthday–following a legal custodian battle stretching on for years before coming under the possession of Cartier, once again. Although the story gets murkier, the layered and contested creations of the necklace makes one thing clear–it was always about love. Yet to remember it only as Elizabeth Taylor’s is what negotiates it as something far more palpable than it actually is. And here lies the sharper tension, Cartier became the institution, and not history, that dictates who wears it and which version of its past gets to shimmer beneath the red carpet fluorescence.

Pragmatically, the matter is simple. Cartier owns the jewel and Robbie had the privilege of wearing it. So why does it unfold in miscellaneous layers? Well, not too long ago, Diljit Dosanjh, a renowned Punjabi music artist, sought access to the magnificent Patiala necklace, originally commissioned in 1928 by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh and crafted by Cartier, for his Met Gala appearance in 2025. The necklace, much like the Mughal pendant, was rumoured to have disappeared after India gained independence in 1947. The centre piece was rediscovered by a Cartier representative in a second-hand antique shop–the fortuity being far from an incidental affair. 

It was remarkably a straightforward idea: as one of the first artists of Punjabi descent to command that stage, he would honour it by blending his royal Punjabi heritage with the gala’s theme of ‘Black dandyism’. And what more coherent insignia of that lineage than the very necklace commissioned for the Maharaja itself? Diljit’s attire, too, fathomed the contemporary fashion ideals unapologetically rooted in his people; royally Sikh with an embroidered cape carved with Gurumukhi script. If anyone deserved to wear the Maharaja’s necklace, it was him. But, in a classic Cartier way, he was denied on ‘museum preservation’ grounds, which echoes reasonability and even prudency in isolation. 

Therein lies the most damning paradox. The same diamond choker was worn by American influencer Emma Chamberlain in 2022. What unfolded wasn’t blatant racist scrutiny but a well-engineered way to preserve heritage and selectively encapsulate who gets to broadcast it too. 

One could argue that a person of colour wearing that piece–especially in a culturally explicit ensemble–is read as political, even pointed. But that furthers the probe: why is a white wearer framed as neutral? And why does historical proximity become perilous when the jewel is worn by those who share the same historical footnote? For people of colour, the message becomes clear, it becomes imperative. Their wealth was extracted, its custody institutionalised that even proximity is now mediated, subsisting in a system that would never let them see their own history on themselves. The pattern is unmistakable. Whiteness is aesthetic. Brownness is political. Perhaps if the jewels are not to be returned, the least that can be done is promised narrative honesty. 

When the full provenance is softened into romance, what is being preserved is not just the diamond but the comfort of forgetting.

Beauty Becomes Buffer

There is another possibility that this moment was catalogued to stir the pot in an industry powered by attention metrics. After all, the adaptation is distinctly reliant on bad press, it’s not being ignored but rather argued over, dissected, and being obstinately kept in circulation. In that context, the hauling of Margot Robbie over coals for her nescient disclosure didn’t derail the recital but quietly escalated it for the whim that bad press is still, in fact, press. 

But here lies the credo far more sinister, Robbie is afforded the luxury of being misunderstood–and still succeeding. That latitude is not evenly distributed. One thing that we may decipher from the ‘trolling’ of celebrities when they are conventionally attractive, white artists, the offshoots rarely exceed the critiques of bad writing, tone-deafness or their craft. Even at its loudest, the discourse tends to assume a baseline of belonging. This is what paves the way for asymmetry when artists of colour step into historically white-coded spaces with conversations having a way of slipping their leash. It may begin as commentary about adaptation fidelity but it metastasises into something substantially more deep-seated: the face, the voice, the legitimacy. 

When Halle Bailey, an African-American actress, was cast as Ariel in The Little Mermaid (2023), this shift in temperature became ghastly apparent with the #NotMyAriel trend on social media; a digital maelstrom morphing into public questioning of herself. In response, Bailey offered a measured perspective, a commiserated effort for her own mistreatment by noting that it was ‘not as bad as what her grandparents faced’. Humorously enough, this was said in a supposedly progressive era and still the only way to rationalise it was to reach back in time where racism required no disguise.

Set against that very landscape, Robbie’s unlettered acknowledgement about Nur Jahan’s pendant will be forgotten, forgiven, and people will still watch the film. The only negative thing they would utter about her would be the abysmal storyline or that she looked way too 2026 for a character set in colder, older worlds. Even Jacob Elordi, Robbie’s beloved counterpart in the movie, was condemned for being too pretty–not too white. The disparity emphasises who is allowed to err within the frame, and who must first justify their existence in it.

The Beautiful Heathcliff Bigotry

But what happens to artists outside of their art or how they are treated beyond their performance is very tremulous and fickle; however outrage for what the movie entailed? Absolutely justifiable. According to the director of the adaptation, Emerald Fennell, Jacob Elordi fit precisely what she had always envisioned Heathcliff to be. In fact, she has suggested that her version of the novel only became conceivable after working with him on the set of Saltburn (2023) a film luxuriating in polished decadence and casual class contempt.

Only catch? Heathcliff was not white. He was described as a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’ and also referred to as ‘Lascar’ (a term used for South Asian labourers on British ships), with speculation that he may be Black, Romani, or have mixed origins but certainly not white. Nevertheless, what Fennell envisioned at fourteen eventually materialised onscreen; her fantasy evolved in scale, not in paradigm. Not only this, positioning Heathcliff as favoured by the stratified racial hierarchies de-signifies the marginalisation that fueled his rage in the book, causing him to inflict psychological and emotional torment on others. Moulding the book in accordance to fit your narrative? That’s a story we’ve heard before: ability reshapes what it does not wish to confront. 

Of course, one could argue that it was her interpretation; if the romantic lead is ‘white’, there is representation elsewhere. That’s the defense many pointed to, citing the casting of Nelly and Edgar Linton. Nelly Dean, Catherine’s housekeeper in the novel, is redrafted as the illegitimate daughter of a lord–first played by Vy Nguyen as a teen and later Hong Chau, both actresses belonging to Vietnamese ethnicity. In the original text, Nelly is a white servant and the narrator permitted to determine the tale while being bound to social hierarchies. On the contrary, her role in the movie diminishes as she is cast off as a ‘dirty secret’ discarded as quickly as she is introduced. Paradoxically enough, she became the most maligned character on screen too, blamed for the romantic tragedy of Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s estrangement. 

Even Edgar Linton, the white genteel and affluent rival to Heathcliff, suffers a similarly attenuated fate; in the book, he serves as the direct consequence of social cohesion that simultaneously confines Heathcliff’s outsider existence. However, Edgar–played by a Pakistani British actor Shazad Latif–gets flattened, stripped of significance and charisma, rewritten as little more than a substitute of diversity.

What is truly baffling is that no one questions the personification of characters of colour in roles originally intended for white protagonists, precisely because they are morally diluted and narratively relegated to irrelevance. Even today, the casting choice preserves the primacy of whiteness: the romantic lead remains white, attractive. Their moral ambiguities are softened by beauty and social privilege. Even with representation being technically present, characters of colour will rarely occupy the space of adoration, be the objects of obsessive lore, or be granted the audience’s indulgent sympathy as morally grey figures. 

What this confers is the undeniable gospel of contemporary cinema: inclusion is tolerable, but only at the peripheries. It may exist. Yet, may it never surpass its capacity as an ornamental appendage and dominate.