Natural inspirations are neither new nor unique to Cartier. But where this grand maison differs is how expressively it renders its subjects. Enter the brand’s Nature Sauvage collection of high jewellery for 2024, which captures with astounding shapes, volumes, silhouettes and savoir-faire the vivacity of animal life.
It is all, according to director of high jewellery creation Jacqueline Karachi, a “new perspective on the Cartier animals”. In particular, their ability to surprise and amaze by way of unexpected encounters.
Consider, for example, the maison’s emblematic panther, which first appeared in its collections in 1914. The legendary design director Jeanne Toussaint made a signature of it and enshrined it as a house signature, but this year Karachi’s panther takes on startling new life.
Behold the Panthère Jaillissante, one of the highlights of the Nature Sauvage range. A hybrid ring-bracelet jewel in which the majestic feline’s hind coils from just beyond the wrist, unfurling into a stretched panther, one paw extending into a ring and guarding with jealousy an 8.63-carat sugarloaf-cut Zambian emerald. The creature’s coat is rendered entirely in diamonds, flecked with blue sapphires. And, as is the Cartier tradition, its eyes are given life with luminous emeralds.
Central to the collection is the sense of nature—wild, independent, uncontrollable—in movement that defies taming. And it’s not just relegated to majestic panthers that can sprint and pounce with alacrity.
Take the Mochelys necklace, with a seemingly nature-inspired abstract motif that curls around the neck. At its end, however, the motif picks up, develops and shapes itself into the outline and impression of a turtle, which seems to bite onto a strand of an impressive 71.9-carat rubellite. Unlike the bold panther, which makes itself known, Cartier’s turtle feels almost as if a reluctant star of the show, the patterns of its shell blending into the geometry of the necklace. Personality, in all its forms, embodied in a Cartier menagerie.
The September ‘Kitsch’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available online or on newsstands.
