Fresh from Cannes, Sweden’s leading actor, Alexander Skarsgård and brand ambassadors Zoe Saldaña, Anna Sawai and Deepika Padukone were in Stockholm last night for the unveiling of Cartier’s latest haute jewellery collection.
Those of you lucky enough to have seen the sell-out Cartier exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, will have witnessed the jaw-dropping nature of Cartier’s fine jewellery archive and noted the quality of its customers, too – from maharajas to movie stars, socialites to tsarinas.
At first then, the Swedish capital – home to IKEA, Volvo and pickled herring – may have seemed like the most incongruous of settings to host the world’s most extravagant stones. After all, what have flat-packed DIY kits and dependable cars got to do with the jewellery equivalent of haut-couture?
Swedish clichés aside, the Scandi setting became crystal clear. Stockholm, a collection of 14 islands embedded in Baltic waterways and nature, is where the original concept of ‘Lagom’ hails from; the belief system that pleasure lies in finding the exact balance in everything. Aspiring to mirror this harmony, Cartier called its collection, ‘En Équilibre’ – in balance.
Some 250 clients from all over the world were expected to descend on Stockholm this week to view – and buy from – the world’s number one jewellery brand. Cartier, like Hermes, Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton, occupies a seat at the utmost exclusive table of luxury brands that can boast annual sales over 10 billion euros.
Balance in the world of Cartier means a necklace whose centre piece is a 39 carat (think gobstopper-sized) emerald clasped in the paws of a tiger cut from black onyx and multiple shades of yellow diamonds to evoke ripples in the big cat’s fur. Harmony is a choker inspired by a peacock feather which includes a 58 carat (almost golf ball-sized) sapphire, housed in 1,645 diamonds, that could be detached and worn - more casually - as a pendant. Said piece took 5,700 hours to make.
There was a diamond and platinum tiara inspired by the wings of a dove, a neck piece boasting waterfalls of rubies, a giant opal cuff with what looked like a whole cosmos of stars winking in the sunlight. There were new takes on Cartier’s legendary 1920s series fashioned from rubies, sapphires and emeralds, known as ‘Tutti Frutti’. Naturally, the brand’s iconic panther prowled across everything from watch faces to wrist cuffs and not least a neck adornment named Panthère Dentelle in which hundreds of carats worth of Colombian emerald beads cascaded toward the animal whose coat was interpreted as lace-like openwork.
When Cartier hails its latest collection ‘Rien de Trop’ – not too much of anything – it isn’t being ironic; indeed, Cartier considered this, ‘episode one’ of the collection, to be restrained. Despite the abundant luxury in each piece - such infinite detail is impossible to convey – it seems there is a limitless desire for these precious natural rocks that are turned into high art for the 0.001 per cent. It was good, then, to witness the deep respect that the craftspeople have for these precious raw materials, as they demonstrated the making of a panther and the polishing of platinum ‘lace’. They are, as Cartier likes to say, at the service of the stones.
Cartier’s two-day event ended with an evening gala at the Artipelag, the modern art museum located in the Stockholm Archipelago, founded by Björn Jacobson, the entrepreneur behind the papoose and pram company, BabyBjörn – and well worth the picturesque boat trip there, if you’re ever in Stockholm. The glass and steel gallery, nestled into the rocky terrain, surrounded by sea and nature, embodying tradition and innovation simultaneously, was a fitting reminder of the yin-yang balance that Cartier was championing and that Stockholm so neatly represents.
Rebecca Lowthorpe worked as fashion director for Grazia from 2016 to 2019; she is currently Grazia’s acting assistant editor, overseeing fashion and beauty content.