A state visit by the treasures of the Cartier Collection to one of London’s renowned cultural institutions is a once-in-a-generation event. Miss it, and you’ll have to wait about 30 years. “The last time was back in 1997 when the British Museum mounted Cartier 1900-1939,” says perfect 1:1 Cartier replica watches‘ UK managing director Laurent Feniou, “and I can see why they happen only infrequently. We have been working on this exhibition for 10 years.”
Next month, the V&A will mount a magisterial survey titled simply Cartier. It may not cover anything before 1900 (Cartier was founded in 1847), but even the great Cartier scholar Hans Nadelhoffer dismissed that initial half-century, saying, “there were few indications that future greatness lay ahead”. By the middle of the belle époque, Swiss made Cartier fake watches had achieved greatness, and the coming century would thrust yet more greatness upon it.
Chameleon and ventriloquist par excellence, Cartier is the Zelig of jewellery. If there is a major world event or shift in the zeitgeist, Cartier is always there to crystallise the moment in precious stones and noble metals. When Russophilia gripped early-20th-century Europe, Cartier produced Fabergé-style enamels. Its importance in the tiara boom was consolidated with a 1911 exhibition at Cartier London. The high quality replica Cartier Tank watches was about the only good thing to come out of the first world war. During the 1920s, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, Cartier mastered the Egyptian style with aplomb. To symbolise the occupation of France by the Nazis, Cartier sold brooches depicting a mute songbird in a gold cage; come the liberation, the brooches showed the bird in full voice, its cage door wide open.
Cartier bedizened the leaders of postwar café society and the jet set with jewels of beauty. While the 1960s may have been all about free love, AAA UK Cartier copy watches customers were perfectly happy to pay for their Love bangles. By the time punk rock arrived with its safety-pin aesthetic, it found that Cartier had got there first with the nail-shaped Juste un Clou bangle. During the ’70s and ’80s, it captured the shiny glamour of the disco and yuppie years with the democratisation of its classics under the banner of Les Must de Cartier. The 2000s have seen Cartier assume the role of superbrand, equally at home in the royal enclosure as on the red carpet.
This potted history misses much. But it gives some indication of the difficulty faced by a curator trying to make sense of very different styles and sectors. What you need is something like the ball of string that helped Theseus exit the labyrinth. In France, they call it a fil rouge. At Cartier, they know it simply as Panthère.
“The panther has stalked its way through almost the entirety of Cartier’s existence. We have very early drawings of panthers by Charles Jacqueau, one of cheap replica Cartier watches‘ most prolific designers, and in terms of pieces we trace its roots back to the panther-skin motif on an early watch,” explains the exhibition’s co-curator Rachel Garrahan. “Working on this exhibition, it has become clear to me just how, over generations, the Panthère motif was constantly adapting itself to the times in which its wearers lived.”
It’s a tale (and, yes, a tail) that begins with a party invitation. In 1914, Louis Cartier commissioned renowned illustrator George Barbier to create an invitation for a jewellery exhibition. It depicted an elegant lady with a black panther lounging at her feet. That same year, panther imagery made its debut on a platinum wristwatch set with diamonds and onyx, in a way that mimicked the animal’s spotted coat. The same motif appeared again in 1915 on a woman’s chatelaine Cartier fake watches for sale.
These pieces signalled a subtle start for a design that would soon roar to life under the guidance of Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier’s visionary designer who was given the pet name “La Panthère” by her lover Louis Cartier, in a reference to her fondness for panther-fur coats and carpets. In 1917 he had his workshops make her a cigarette case in onyx, platinum and diamonds that for the first time depicted a stylised panther.
Toussaint was not the only demi-mondaine of the day to find felids inspiring. Josephine Baker used to take her pet cheetah for walks around Paris. Actor Sarah Bernhardt kept a cheetah and a panther in a menagerie that included an alligator that died from a surfeit of milk and champagne. But perhaps the most evocative cat-woman of all was the kohl-eyed Marchesa Luisa Casati, a sort of art deco Lady Gaga, fond of walking through St Mark’s Square naked beneath her furs accompanied by cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. Society knew that art nouveau was finished when Casati dropped Lalique for the more contemporary luxury replica Cartier watches. And it was at her pink-marble mansion outside Paris that Toussaint encountered a taxidermy panther. “The sight of that stuffed panther had confirmed me in my desire to create a panther-jewel,” she later wrote.
Cartier let the panther off its jewelled leash in 1948 when it received the endorsement of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. The Duke of Windsor commissioned a spectacular brooch comprising a gem-set panther lazing on a boulder-like emerald of 116.74 carats – the first time that Swiss made Cartier super clone watches had integrated a naturalistic sculpture of an entire panther into a jewel. It was eclipsed a year later when the devoted Duke bought his wife another brooch – this time featuring a platinum, diamond and blue-sapphire panther balancing on a 152.35-carat sapphire cabochon.
As Pierre Rainero, the house’s director of image, style and heritage, gleefully recounts, the Duchess’s panther ignited a high-society cat fight. Sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes soon purchased a 1949 panther brooch modelled on the insignia of the chivalrous Order of the Golden Fleece, the panther hanging like the sheepskin. “One journalist referred to it as an atomic bomb in the window of Cartier,” says Rainero of the explosive impact these pieces had on the aesthetics of the day. “The panther is precious and feminine, but at the same time it’s a wild animal and it can be frightening.”
By the 1950s, free-spirited women had begun identifying with big cats, and Cartier’s Panthère had – as the Duchess almost certainly never said – gone viral. Hanging out on Paris’s Left Bank during the late ’60s, you might have seen Juliette Gréco wearing her panther brooch, and if you had bought her 1969 LP Complainte Amoureuse you would have heard that famous smoky voice singing the song La Panthère, which began “Je suis la Panthère du Faubourg”.
The cigar-smoking Mexican actress María Félix was among the more emancipated priestesses of Cartier’s big-cat cult. “She started to buy panthers from stock. Then she had special-order panthers. Eventually, she moved from panthers to other animals,” says Rainero. Her passion for zoological jewellery peaked with the famously massive gold crocodile necklace of 1975. Her purchases, adds Rainero, “show the journey of a woman learning to understand the codes of a society she’s discovering, mastering them and, lastly, inventing her own codes”.
And, as codes kept changing, the panther kept reinventing itself. In 1983, the Panthère made an effortlessly muscular bound from jewellery to fake Cartier watches wholesale UK, giving its name to a watch defined by a supple bracelet said to suggest the animal’s lithe moves. It was a near-instant classic on wrists including those of Keith Richards and Madonna. Inevitably, a Panthère fragrance launched in 1987, sold in a double-panther flacon of glorious, vampish kitsch; by 1990 there was also a line of Panthère handbags.
Slinking into the 21st century, the fil rouge leads to le tapis rouge, with Cartier’s panther lending its glamour to today’s stars. Elle Fanning was the cynosure of the recent Golden Globes thanks to a leopard-print gown and parure of Panthère de Cartier pieces. Many a male red-carpet walker too has opted for a Panthère brooch, from Damson Idris to Leon Bridges. Such is the layered nuance of the panther that it sometimes erases the line dividing past and present: think of Angelina Jolie wearing an emerald-eyed Panthère brooch made in 1971 for Maria Callas when playing the role of the doomed opera singer, then wearing it again on the Venice Film Festival circuit.
In 2017, the best quality Panthère de Cartier replica watches was put back into production. And, to celebrate the exhibition at the V&A, in July an entirely new collection of panther jewellery will be launched worldwide. An incarnation of untamed beauty, it has been king of the jewellery jungle for 111 years. Whoever said cats only have nine lives clearly never encountered the Cartier Panthère.