Just days before the 2024 Emmys, Anna Sawai has returned to Los Angeles from Australia, where she’s been filming her latest project. A few days prior, at the Creative Arts Emmys, Shōgun—a retelling of the 1975 James Clavell novel, the story of an English sailor who has landed in feudal Japan—took home an impressive 14 trophies and is expected to win big again tonight. Sawai herself is nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series.
While Sawai has received heaps of praise for her role of Lady Mariko, she chose to mark the moment by honouring someone else: her mother. “After finishing Shōgun, I wanted to give my mom a gift just to thank her for allowing me to go the path that I’m on,” Sawai tells Vogue. “I bought her a Cartier Love ring. I didn’t get one for myself because it is luxury; it was a lot, but I wanted to give the most important person a gift.” For the actor, jewellery is a way to honour important people or memories. “It’s more than just something that you put on—it’s like a memory that you carry with you, and whenever you look down, you’re thinking of that memory,” she says. With her gift to her mother, Sawai wanted her to be able to look down and feel like she was there with her. “If my mom looks at the Love ring, I feel like she feels connected to me.”
Today, Anna Sawai joins Cartier as their newest brand ambassador. “It means so much and to be able to work with them,” she says, Zooming in from the car. But then, something catches her eye offscreen. “Sorry, I’m seeing dogs right in front of me! I’m getting so excited,” she says, turning the camera around to what looks like a West Hollywood intersection. After the pups duck back inside their cars, she returns to the topic at hand. “To me Cartier is just so classic: It’s sophisticated, it’s beautiful, and it’s not trying hard. I wear jeans and these kind of [simple] outfits, but just with a Cartier ring, I feel so put together.”
With her jewellery choices for the Emmys, Cartier is helping Sawai pay homage to Lady Mariko. “My stylist asked me if there’s any designer that I’ve always wanted to wear and Vera Wang was the first person that I mentioned, and she happily said yes to designing a dress for me,” she says of her red strapless dress with a drop-waist peplum. Between her red dress and her Cartier jewellery, Sawai’s entire Emmys look is a tribute to her character, and her emotional growth throughout the season. For her jewellery, she wore a pair of dangling earrings from Cartier High Jewellery with alternating diamond-encrusted platinum and onyx bands, and punctuated with rubies. She also added a Reflection de Cartier ring, an 18-carat white gold ring set with baguette-cut, princess-cut, and troidia-cut diamonds. “We loved how modern they felt and somehow that they felt Shōgun,” Sawai’s stylist Karla Welch says. “The whole look was clean, modern, Princess.”
As the show’s costume designer Carlos Rosario (who was among the show’s impressive 14 Creative Arts Emmy wins) told Vogue, “When we meet her in the beginning, she’s lifeless, so I wanted her costumes to reflect that… You have all these graphics, these patterns of snow covering the grass of branches without leaves. That was my way of telling the audience, here is a character that walks in life without purpose, without intention, and slowly as she finds her power, as she finds her purpose, you can see that the camellias are blooming in her costume.”
Although Shōgun has been renewed at Hulu, it’s unlikely we’ll see Sawai reprise her role. So for Lady Mariko’s swan song, Sawai wanted to bring those references into her wardrobe. “The red dress with the diamond jewellery is really gonna be an homage to the character,” she says.
This article was originally published on Vogue US.
