SWEET HARMONY
A Gothic palace in Paris was a fitting venue for the launch of the Clash de Cartier collection, a sublime interplay of elegance and avant-garde. By Alice Cavanagh.
The Clash de Cartier jewellery collection is a sublime interplay of elegance and avant-garde.
The Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité in Paris, a former palace and later the tribunal where thousands of victims of the French Revolution were tried, is one of the city’s most-well trodden tourist destinations. By day, a flurry of visitors from all over the globe trail through the storied halls, chambers and dungeons, to see where the likes of Marie-Antoinette spent their final days before they were carted off to the guillotine. The usual attire is resolutely city day-tripper: a mix of denim and well-worn sneakers; a bum-bag here and there.
When arriving at the Conciergerie for a Cartier gala dinner one evening in April, the scene was remarkably different. For just one night, the luxury jewellery maison took over the immense Salle des Gens d’armes (Hall of the Soldiers), a Gothic architectural masterpiece with majestic vaulted ceilings, and laid out three long banquet tables for a decadent dinner party. Three-hundred-and-fifty guests attended, including the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Sofia Coppola, Claire Foy, Tilda Swinton and Monica Bellucci, her signature curves contained in a sharp white tuxedo. Over a three-course dinner, the drinks flowed freely and the dancing kicked off when French songstress Chris (formerly Christine and the Queens) first took to the stage, followed by retro punk rocker Billy Idol, who whipped the crowd up into a joyous frenzy. Marie-Antoinette, infamously flamboyant in her zenith years, would have relished it all.
This glamorous event, with its poetic dash of debauchery, was in support of the launch of Cartier’s newest line of jewellery, Clash de Cartier: a boldly graphic and elegant new collection of gold earrings, bracelets, rings and necklaces. The line cleverly remixes three elements that have long been part of the maison’s design heritage – studs, beads and clous carrés – and binds them together as an
eternal 3D motif. The result is a surprising commingling of punkish allure and timeless sophistication – cast, of course, in fine jewellery trappings.
To coincide with the release of Clash de Cartier, the theme of duality was explored in a campaign film starring British actress Kaya Scodelario, of Skins and Maze Runner fame, and most recently, the disarming Ted Bundy feature, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile with Zac Efron. In the Cartier short, fashion photographer and filmmaker Gordon von Steiner directs Scodelario in a sort of face-off, in which she plays two opposing versions of herself. To the familiar guitar riffs of Idol’s 1982 smash hit Dancing with Myself, the actress first appears in one frame glamorously decked-out in an ankle-grazing evening dress; her mirror reflection is a more mischievous muse wearing sprayed-on vinyl pants.
The interaction between the two characters plays out like an allegory on the line’s dichotomous appeal, and when you examine the collection you’ll find the theme carries all the way through to the finest minutiae in the design. At first glance, the components of the jewellery appear to be angular but they’re actually polished smooth, and while the form is quite bold, the individual parts move on their own with delicate articulation. You get a sense that the jewellers at Cartier had fun with this.
“As far as the aesthetic vocabulary is concerned, we have plenty to work with from our dictionary, but the idea was not only the combination of different shapes but also this idea of the movement – the mobility was key,” says Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s image, style and heritage director, of the collection’s playful feel. Rainero has worked with the brand for 35 years and is something of a guiding light for the team. “For me, everything has to be authentic, so let’s say my role in the development of everything is that I am here to say yes, this is the right direction,” he says.
“The preoccupation we have is imagining that a piece has to be wearable. Desirability is not achieved only because it is beautiful, it’s because you can live with it”
His rule of thumb? “Something should be very Cartier, but it also has to be very new.”
The concept of new, he admits today, has both contemporary and practical connotations. “The permanent preoccupation we have is imagining that a piece has to be wearable,” he says, adding: “Desirability is not achieved only because it is beautiful, it’s because you can live with it.”
To illustrate the process of creation behind Clash de Cartier, the Paris launch event coincided with a small exhibition at the newly renovated boutique at Place Vendôme, the fine-jewellery epicentre of the world. The exhibition traced the evolution of some of Cartier’s codes and displayed a 1948 boule ring with rows of sapphire beads that once belonged to the American heiress Daisy Fellowes, a devoted Cartier customer who was the epitome of cafe society in Paris in the 1930s. The ring was a reference for the Clash de Cartier’s limited-edition capsule collection, which sees the original motif adorned with a row of coral beads as bright as berries. This animation, for Rainero, illustrates the long-term potential of the collection. “The coral shows how the original idea can be permanently enriched: this idea of a design that is not betrayed when you change one element. On the contrary, you can move the elements, add another one, and you still have the same idea … you can also change the volume and still remain with the idea, and then there is the colour and the materials,” he says, alluding to how a Cartier icon is made. In addition to the coral and the classic rose-gold collection, there is also a variation that features diamonds.
Alongside Fellowes, Cartier has had a long history with modern and audacious women. There’s Elizabeth Taylor, of course, and there was also Wallis Simpson, or the Duchess of Windsor, who was renowned for her unparalleled sense of style and is credited with popularising the Cartier panther. Her first was a gift from the Duke, a yellow gold panther brooch with black enamel spots sitting on a large emerald. It’s easy to imagine that all of these women would have been some of the first in line for the new Clash de Cartier.