Cartier jeweller, Riyadh, 2021. Photograph: Meshari Alawfi. CC BY 4.0.
By Beatrice Loxley
There are jewellery houses that produce beautiful things, and then there is Cartier, which has somehow managed to turn the act of receiving a small red box into an event in itself. The curious thing is that Cartier's enduring appeal has rather little to do with the size of the diamond. Its greatest achievement has been to make jewellery feel simultaneously historic and entirely at home in the present.
Cartier's history is crowded with the sort of names that make a jewellery historian rather breathless: royal families, maharajas, American heiresses, actresses and the great society figures of the twentieth century. The house became a favourite of royalty and international high society, and its pieces travelled between London, Paris and New York as the world of fashionable society became increasingly international. Yet it is not the enormous tiaras that explain why Cartier remains so desirable. It is the pieces that entered ordinary jewellery boxes.
The Trinity ring is perhaps the best example. Three interlocking bands of yellow, white and rose gold, designed in 1924, it has an almost disarmingly simple appearance. There is no enormous stone to announce its importance and no complicated setting demanding an explanation. It is simply an exceptionally well-designed object. That is probably why it has survived so successfully. A good design does not require its owner to dress around it.
Then there is the Love bracelet, which is a rather different proposition. Introduced in 1969, it is one of those objects that manages to be both slightly ridiculous and completely convincing. The idea of fastening a bracelet to the wrist with a little screwdriver is wonderfully theatrical, particularly in an age in which jewellery is so often described in the language of investment and versatility. The Love bracelet makes no such apology. It announces itself as an object of sentiment, and sentiment has always been one of jewellery's great purposes.
We have been attaching meanings to jewellery for considerably longer than Cartier has existed. Victorian lockets contained photographs and locks of hair; mourning jewellery preserved the memory of the dead; rings were engraved with initials, dates and private messages. A piece of jewellery could mark a marriage, an engagement, a birth or simply the affection between two people. Its monetary value was only one part of its significance. The real value was accumulated through association.
Cartier has always understood this instinct for symbolism particularly well. The panther, the Trinity rings, the Love bracelet and the familiar Cartier motifs have become visual shorthand in their own right. They are recognisable without necessarily requiring a person to know the history behind them. This is rather unusual in luxury, where brands often spend enormous sums attempting to become invisible. Cartier has never seemed especially interested in disappearing.
Perhaps that is why it feels slightly refreshing now. We have spent the last few years being told that good taste means not looking as though you have spent money. Quiet luxury has encouraged the discreet cashmere coat, the unmarked handbag and the watch that only another person with an expensive watch will recognise. Cartier takes a rather different view. Its little red box is hardly an exercise in anonymity, and a Cartier Love bracelet is not going to be mistaken for something found in the back of the drawer.
But there is a difference between conspicuousness and recognition. Cartier's strongest pieces are not desirable simply because they announce their price. They are desirable because they have acquired a visual language of their own. You can inherit a Cartier bracelet, wear it for thirty years and pass it to someone else without it looking trapped in the decade in which it was bought. That is a considerable achievement in fashion.
Perhaps this explains why jewellery occupies such a different place from clothing. A dress belongs to a moment; a jewel can belong to several generations. Clothes tell us what we wanted to look like at a particular age, while jewellery often tells us who we belonged to, who loved us or what happened to us. A jewellery box is therefore a peculiar sort of family archive, containing objects whose histories are often much more interesting than their receipts.
And this is why we still want Cartier. Not because a particular bracelet will make us look wealthy, nor because a red box has some mysterious power over the human imagination, although it undoubtedly helps. We want it because the best jewellery promises to become part of our own history. One day the ring or bracelet will be older than its owner, and perhaps more importantly, it will carry memories that cannot be bought again.
The finest piece in a jewellery box is therefore not necessarily the most valuable one. It is the one that has a story worth telling. Cartier has simply been extraordinarily good at giving those stories somewhere beautiful to begin.