Cartier Libre pushes beyond creative boundaries to subvert conventions and create a new collection charged with inspiration each year, unveiling jewelry characterized by unashamed extremism. It reworks form, questions design, challenging techniques and savoir-faire, always achieving the ultimate in innovation thanks to the brand’s strong curiosity to investigate the unexplored. After revolutionizing forms in watchmaking, Cartier Libre turns to research in the world of jewelry, resulting in creations with essential forms, elegant lines, important volumes, and strong contrasts. The new Tressage collection focuses on the Maison’s most cherished elements, bringing together three aesthetic codes that completely reinterpret the goldsmith’s workmanship. The point of reference for the brand’s creatives is Jeanne Toussaint, known as The Panther, Cartier’s first woman creative director. She invited to live beauty to the fullest, with unparalleled taste and a lot of passion, she had a desire to discover, always showing herself determined and free: she shared so much with the French Maison that the panther is still the undisputed symbol of Cartier. The shapes and different combinations of materials studied by Toussaint are reproposed in the new collection, transforming the previously explored terrain as a starting point to push towards innovation and imagination.
A new dimension that ushers in a transversal vision and explores all possibilities with equal momentum.
The first model in the Tressage collection explores the volume of jewelry: a matching ring and bracelet are composed of a multitude of gold spheres capable of looking like a uniform material. The sphere, an emblematic form of the Maison that Jeanne Toussaint had also worked on extensively, is renewed, creating the illusion of a continuous chain that rolls up on itself to give rise to different dimensions and a tactile play on the skin. The second model challenges the limits of structure, by making hard materials, such as stone, appear as soft, living forms wrapped in precious laces. The brand works in particular with yellow gold, which increases luminosity, metaquartzite, an opaque black stone, and obsidian, which reveals a distinctive iridescence. A long ribbon of platinum adorned with diamonds unrolls trying to contain the material, which, thanks to its workmanship, seems to want to free itself from constraints by transcending all limits. The third model focuses on color, showing the Maison’s great skill in working with coral, which because of its friability, a small inaccuracy could make hours and hours of work in vain. Jeanne Toussaint was very fascinated by the color palette, which nowadays is combined with gold and diamonds to create a braid, which is actually a striking trompe-l’oeil, that hugs the wrist or encircles the finger. Through the three different combinations Cartier reworks aspects already present in the brand’s archives, showing its innate contemporaneity and its irrepressible desire to always push the limits of what is possible.
A creative freedom without hesitation that has grown over time to become an essential feature of the Maison’s style. A powerful imprint, an indelible mark of the collection.
The latest item of the collection is a piece of jewelry that fuses rock character with the elegant aesthetic of haute couture. Cartier wants to challenge itself in order to grow, with the goal of always being one step ahead: the cape is precious, transforming itself into a fluid, silky parure that, starting with the necklace, lay down on the rest of the body. A garment profiled by tassels and a cabaret-inspired accessory come to life simultaneously from the jewel, for a refined and uncompromising spirit, free to express itself without any constraints. The creation develops through the study of images and iconographic research that gradually turned into a dialogue in which the different savoir-faire complement each other. The knit composed of tiny hand-assembled gold rings is designed like a dress, but the result is a light, soft material that once worn embraces the body like a second skin. Cartier combines rigor and audacity, tension and free self-expression: the Tressage collection is a jewelry impetus that gives life to an hybrid creation, a reflection of the craftsmanship of artisans and their propensity to transcend all boundaries.
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