NAILED IT
Revisiting a 70s design classic, Cartier transforms the mundane into the sublime.
The ancient Romans may have questioned an 18-karat gold nail wrapped around the wrist as a piece of jewellery … bounties of sapphires, rubies and emeralds this is not. Rather, it is an example of visual humour that could only really have manifested in the 20th century. We have Aldo Cipullo to thank for this one. Cipullo is the idiosyncratic Cartier designer from Rome who landed in New York, making a scene in the jewellery world with his blond hair and blue eyes – oh, and at Studio 54, with his appreciation of a good time, where he was most likely surrounded by party-goers who either wore his designs or craved buying them. Cipullo was allowed to sign his designs while at the house alongside the Cartier name – a Cartier rarity. And he pulled the jewellery world into the now. “To repeat the past is an easy way to get out of thinking; it’s an escape,” he once commented. “The important thing is to reflect the present.” A fixation on the haute quincaillerie – or “high hand ware” – explains how the Love bangle is affixed with a screw and sheds light on the Juste Un Clou collection of nail-as-jewellery pieces. “I liked the elements between structure, design and people,” he once said. “When you design, you have to think of people … [jewellery] is part of the function of the body, and not just an embellishment.” Creating something precious to be worn on the body from something ordinary – how modern, no?
The word modernity gets thrown around a lot with jewellery. I posit this to Pierre Rainero of Cartier, the French jewellery house’s image, style and heritage director. Standing inside Cartier’s Precious Garage – an art installation celebrating the Juste Un Clou collection, created by artist Desi Santiago for Milan Design Week – Rainero challenges how the term modernity is used. “It depends on what we call modern, because what is modern about the nail?” he asks over a midmorning espresso, because we are in Milan, where the days are broken up by caffeine pit stops. The nail itself is not modern, but how it has been manipulated into a piece of jewellery – one that conveys lightness, elegance but also a delicate toughness – is. “The ancient times had nails, so the shape is not modern. What is modern is to be appropriate to the way of life of the people and the way objects are integrated into modern life,” he says, referencing Louis Sullivan’s 1896 statement about form following function. “Design has to be part of function,” Cipullo himself once said. “That’s the secret of success. When you have function and design married together, you always have a successful item.”
The visual trickery of a precious metal in the form of a common utilitarian object is the premise behind Santiago’s installation. Made up of chrome-coated car parts, from a limited-edition Corvette Stingray to be exact, the jewellery pieces are displayed in between these parts. “They are these very mundane, everyday objects and we have elevated them to the highest form,” Santiago explains of his chroming process, which makes it look as if the car parts were dipped into vats of gold. Santiago has also made sculptures and designed jewellery. “For me it always comes back to the body – and the car is a metaphor for the body, and here it is as a beautiful sculptural object,” he says.
While he’s not a car fan as such, it is the tinkering of machinery that ignited his interest; on the sly, he has been known to open the doors of his lift shaft to marvel at the machinery work. “I find all those sculptural forms moving together to create an energy out of nothingness so beautiful and inspiring,” says the artist, who has worked on installations for the Louis Vuitton Marc Jacobs exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Alexander McQueen at the Costume Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Santiago is a former club kid who “threw a lot of parties”, as he mildly puts it – a bit like a modern-day Cipullo, perhaps. I tell him I’ve read about that part of his life online, where his partying is well documented. “It’s all over,” he says, laughing right back, because nowadays he has replaced an active nightlife with meditation and quiet walks around the city on his own – he had done this just that a few days earlier, walking around Milan admiring the city’s buildings and churches. “I like the mix of the old and the new here, it’s all sort of smashed together,” he says of his brief visits to the city.
To put it frankly, Milan has never had the same romantic illusions as Italian sister cities Rome and Florence. On the fashion week merry-go-round Milan is the quieter city, lacking the first-off-the-rank velocity of New York, the quirk of London, the majesty of Paris. But Milan, home of the headquarters of Gucci and Prada, the former recently reinvigorated, is now a highlight of the fashion calendar, and the city is abuzz with activity. And as Rainero reminds me, while pulling out his phone to share his Milanese restaurant recommendations, it’s also a major European financial hub.
“Rome and Florence, they can take something from Milan!” he says in jest. Milan has always raced to the new and modern, with more skyscrapers than most of Italy. The city embraces its rumbling industrial heart and the rest of Italy and the world can finally start to see it too.
But back to the Juste Un Clou collection and a quick fact about the aforementioned nail-cum-jewellery design: when it was launched in 1970 and lauded for being designed by the great Cipullo, it was noticeably less successful than its peer, the Love bangle. So it was quietly sent into retirement just four years after its debut. Then it was re-released in 2012 with great fanfare and even greater success. Second time’s a charm.
“At Cartier, we are not immune to the tastes of our world and we were convinced that Juste Un Clou is an object that was relevant for today – we always want to be present,” says Rainero of the revival of the archival piece and its subsequent feting this year in Milan. ( New designs include a thicker bracelet style and a choker style – take this one with or without pavé diamonds.) “The nail can be harmful, so we needed to show that, and its toughness, but also its beauty,” explains Rainero. “The idea of positive curiosity is very Cartier, because beauty lies everywhere.”
“THE NAIL CAN BE HARMFUL, SO WE NEEDED TO SHOW THAT … BUT ALSO ITS BEAUTY”