A state visit from the treasures of the Cartier collection to one of London’s well -known cultural institutions is an event once in a generation. Missing, and you will have to wait about 30 years. “The last time returned in 1997 when the British Museum was set up Cartier 1900-1939“Says Cartier Managing Director in the UK Laurent Feniou,” and I can see why they only happen rarely. We have worked in this exhibition for 10 years. “
Next month, V&D will put on a simply titled magician study Cartion. It may not cover anything before 1900 (Cartier was founded in 1847), but also the great Cartier researcher Hans Nadelhoffer rejected that half -century -old half -century, saying, “There were little indications that future greatness stretched forward.” From the middle of Belle époque, Cartier had achieved greatness, and the next century would throw even more greatness over him.
Cartier Paris 2001 Gold, Diamond, Sapphire, Emerald and Onyx
Chameleon and Ventiloquist par excellence, Cartier is Zelig of jewelery. If there is a major world event or relocation to Zeitgeist, Cartier is always there to crystallize the moment in precious stones and noble metals. When Russophilia captured Europe in the early 20th century, Cartier produced Fabergé style enamel. Its importance in the Tiara bum was consolidated with a 1911 exhibition at Cartier London. Watch Cartier Tank was for the only good thing to get out of World War I. During the 1920s, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, Cartier owned the Egyptian style with aplomb. To symbolize the occupation of France by the Nazis, Cartier sold the brooch describing a silent song in a gold cage; Come Liberation, the brooch showed Zog in full voice, his open cage door.
Cartier laid the leaders of the post -war coffee society and the aircraft set with gems of beauty. While the 1960s may have been everything for free love, Cartier customers were completely happy to pay for their love bangs. By the time Punk Rock arrived with his security aesthetics, she discovered that Cartier had first arrived there with the nail bang Juste un Clou. During the 1970s and 1980s, she captured the bright splendor of the disco and yuppie years with the democratization of his classics under the flag of Les Mustier. The 2000s have seen Cartier take on the role of Superbrand, evenly at home in the royal closure as on the red carpet.
This vase story lacks a lot. But it gives some indications of the difficulty a curator faces trying to understand very different styles and sectors. What you need is something like the verse ball that helped this get out of the labyrinth. In France, they call it a red thread. In Cartier, they know it just like Panthère.
“Panther has blocked its path almost in the entirety of the Cartier existence. We have very early drawings of Panthers from Charles Jacqueau, one of the most fruitful Cartier stylists, and in terms of parts we trace its roots back into the Panther-Lessher motif at an early hour,” explains the co-driver of Rachel Garr. “Working in this exhibition, it has become clear to me how, over the generations, the Panthère motif is constantly adapting to the time in which its clothing lived.”
1914 Illustration by George Barbier for a Cartier exhibition in Paris
1914 Watch Panther-Past: The first use of the Cartier of the “Panther-Skin” motif
1928 Panther Vanity Case
1949 Panthère Clip Boooch, bought by Duke of Windsor
It is a tale (and, yes, a tail) that begins with a party invitation. In 1914, Louis Cartier ordered renowned illustrator George Barbier to create an invitation to a jewelery exhibition. She described an elegant lady with a black panther lying on her feet. In the same year, Panther images made her debut in a platinum wrist clock located with diamonds and onyx, in a way to mimic the polluted coat of the animal. The same motive appeared again in 1915 in a woman’s chatelaine clock.
These parts signaled a delicate start for a design that would soon make noise in life under the direction of Jeanne Toussain, Cartier’s visionary stylist, who was given the pet name “La Panthère” by her lover Louis Cartier, in a reference to her love for coats and carpets. In 1917 he had his workshops to make him a cigarette case in Onyx, Platinum and Diamonds that for the first time described a stylized Panther.
Toussain wasn’t the only one semi-cone of the day to find inspirational felids. Josephine Baker took her pet caressing for a walk around Paris. Actor Sarah Bernhardt held a cheetah and a panther in a managerie that included an alligator who died from a milk and champagne surface. But perhaps, the most evocative cat’s wife of all was Marchesa with the eyes of Kohl Luisa Casati, a kind of art deco lady Gaga, loved to walk through St. Mark Square under her furs accompanied by cheetahs on diamond caterpillars. The society knew that Art Nouveau had finished when Casati threw Lalique for the most contemporary cartier. And she was in her residence with pink wedding outside Paris that Toussain encountered a Panther Taxidermy. “The picture of that panther filled had confirmed me in my desire to create a Panther-Hewel,” she wrote later.
Cartier left Panther to leave her jewel in 1948 when she received the approval of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Duke of Windsor ordered a spectacular brooch that includes a panther located in Gem, departing from an emerald similar to the 116.74 first carat that Cartier had integrated a naturalist sculpture of an entire panther into a jewel. It was eclipsed a year later when the pious Duke bought his wife another brooch-this time showing a platinum, diamond and Blue-Sapphire Panther balancing in a 152.35-karat cabochon.
While Pierre Rainero, the director of the image house, style and heritage, confesses with joy, the Duchess Panther lit a cat war with high friends. The heritage of the Daisy Fellowes sewing machinery soon bought a 1949 Panther brooch modeled on the signs of the golden fur knight, the panthera that depended like the sheep’s skin. “A journalist referred to it as an atomic bomb in the Cartier window,” Rainero says of the explosive influence these parts had on the aesthetics of the day. “Panther is precious and feminine, but at the same time it is a wild animal and can be scary.”
Until the 1950s, free-spirited women had begun to identify with big cats, and Cartier-as Panthère had almost certainly never gone viral. Hanging on the left shore of Paris during the late ’60s, you may have seen Juliette Gréco dressed in her Panther brooch, and if you had bought her 1969 LP Loving Would have heard that smoked famous voice singing the song Pantherwhich started ”I’m Panther of Faubourg. ”
Mexican cigarette drinking actress María Félix was one of the most emancipated priests of Cartier’s big cat cult. “She started buying the panthers from the shares. Then she had special order Panters. Finally, she was transferred from Panters to other animals,” Rinero says. Her passion for zoological ornament culminated in the 1975 famous golden crocodile necklace. Its purchases adds Rainero, “Show the journey of a woman learning to understand the codes of a society she is discovering, mastering them and, finally, inventing her codes.”
1978 Panther Bangle
1989 Panade
2014 Cartier Paris Platinum, Diamond, Emerald and Onyx bracelet, from a private collection
Cartier Paris Gold, Diamond, Emerald and Onyx Panthère de Cartier Byzylyk, £ 54,500
And as the codes continued to change, Panther continued to restore himself. In 1983, Panthère made a light muscle from the jewelery on the schedules, giving its name an hour determined by a neat bracelet reportedly suggesting animal movements. It was a close classic wrist, including those of Keith Richards and Madonna. Inevitably, a panthère aroma launched in 1987, sold in a double flame with glorious, wild kitsch; By 1990 there was also a line of Panthère bags.
Slipping into the 21st century, red thread lead to Red carpetWith Cartier’s Panther lending her splendor to today’s stars. Elle Fanning was the Golden Globes Cynos of the latest thanks to a leopard printed dress and panthère de Cartier. Much a red carpet Walker has also chosen a Panthère brooch, from Damson Idris to Leon Bridges. Such is the layered tinge of Panther that sometimes wipes the line by sharing the past and the present: Think of Angelina Jolie dressed in a 1971 -eyed Panthère brooch for Maria Callas when playing the role of the convicted opera singer, then dressed in the Film Festival circuit in Venice.
In 2017, Panthère de Cartier Watch returned to production. And, to celebrate the exhibition in V&A, in July a completely new collection of Panther’s jewelery will begin all over the world. An embodiment of irregular beauty, has been the king of the jewelery jungle for 111 years. Anyone who said cats have only nine clear lives never encountered Cartier Panthère.
Cartier is in V&A, London SW7, from April 12 to November 16; vam.ac.uk
