Cartier creative director — we must approach a stone with ‘humility’

Jacqueline Karachi has never worked anywhere besides Cartier. The creative director of the 176-year-old jewellery and watches maison joined Cartier’s nearly all-male design studio straight out of the École Boulle in Paris more than four decades ago.

“They thought it was important to have a female perspective when designing the jewels aimed at women,” says Karachi, her tone laced with good-humoured irony, in an interview at Cartier’s Paris headquarters. About 20 years ago, she became the second woman to bear the creative director title at Cartier following Jeanne Toussaint, a legendary designer who steered the brand’s creative efforts between 1933 and 1970, and developed many of its hallmarks.

Today, Karachi presides over Cartier’s high jewellery and watches division, leading a 14-person team of designers who dream up the maison’s grandest creations. These include the finely articulated rose gold collar from its latest Le Voyage Recommencé collection, with its lumbar-like stacks of onyx, coral and diamonds, and a pair of beryl, turquoise and diamond earrings hung with large heliodor pendants in a rich, wine yellow.

Karachi sees herself as a steward of the brand and a mentor to its designers and gemologists — relaying what is Cartier and what is not. “From generation to generation, we transmit this message and this mission,” Karachi says. It’s a language so specific that she and a gemologist can separately browse a gem fair and discover their buying lists match exactly.

“Cartier has a style that is difficult to put into words,” Karachi says. “There’s a sense of proportion, of detail. A timelessness.”

There are the house signatures, of course — the panther, the engraved leaves and berries of Tutti Frutti; the clasp-less Love bracelet; the overlapping bands of the Trinity ring. Cartier flowers, Karachi points out, are never common varieties such as roses or lilies, but something rarer, more exotic — a cactus, an orchid.

It is these longstanding and easily recognisable motifs that draw in clients, says Cyrille Vigneron, Cartier’s chief executive of seven years. “[Clients] come to us wanting something that is not unique but means something to them,” he says, gesturing to the Love bracelets on his wrist, each commemorating a decade of marriage. “Many other people wear these, but they wear them for their own reasons. So they are both unique for me and universal.”

Vigneron helms a company in robust health. Cartier is expected to reach the €10bn revenue mark this year, according to projections by bank HSBC, making it the largest luxury jeweller by revenue and responsible for about three-quarters of profits at parent company Richemont, the Swiss conglomerate that also owns Van Cleef & Arpels and Chloé.

“They have an extremely wide range of price points — entry, or what they call ‘welcome’ jewellery, priced between about €1,000 and €15,000, all the way to high jewellery, with €100,000 and above price points,” observes Thomas Chauvet, luxury analyst at Citi. “Yet they have managed not to dilute the brand.”

Cartier is also rare among jewellers in that it is a major player in watches, outsold only by Rolex in the luxury category, says Vigneron. “It means that Cartier is a brand that [also speaks to] men,” says Chauvet.

Cartier was founded in 1847, on the cusp of France’s February Revolution. In spite of the turmoil, Louis-François Cartier — who had assumed control of his former mentor’s workshop at 29 rue Montorgueil in Paris and soon renamed it after himself — was able to grow the business.

Cartier’s first big commission landed in 1856, when Princess Mathilde, cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, made the first of more than 200 recorded purchases — and opened the door for sales to other members of Europe’s royal families. In 1899, Cartier opened a shop on the prestigious rue de la Paix — still the Cartier flagship today. Louis-François’ three grandsons took the business international, arriving in London in 1902 just in time for Edward VII’s coronation. He ordered 27 tiaras from Cartier for the event, and later called the company the “jeweller of kings, king of jewellers”. An outpost on New York’s Fifth Avenue soon followed.

The ensuing two decades ushered in Cartier’s lasting signatures, developed under the creative direction of the founder’s grandson, Louis: La Panthère, first worked in diamonds and onyx on a gorgeously graphic 1914 wristwatch; the simple Tank wristwatch (designed in 1917 after Louis had spent time on the Western Front in the first world war); and the three-band Trinity ring, which was designed in 1924 and soon found its way on to the left little finger of Jean Cocteau (and decades later was worn by the Duke of Windsor, a loyal client, who proposed to Wallis Simpson with a 19.77-carat emerald Cartier ring). The Tutti Frutti bracelet, with its melange of engraved sapphire, emerald and ruby foliage, arrived in 1925.

Soon after, Toussaint — who had been with Cartier since 1920 — assumed creative control from Louis, becoming the maison’s first female director of fine jewellery and its longest-serving until her retirement in 1970 (Karachi cites her as a major inspiration). That period saw the introduction of two more house icons: the Dalí-esque Crash watch, released in 1967, and the simple gold Love bangle, which can only be opened with a small screwdriver. The Love bangle and its various spin-offs remain the brand’s most popular designs, accounting for about a quarter of sales, says Erwan Rambourg, luxury analyst at HSBC. Cartier’s history and its sense of timelessness continue to draw clients today, says Citi’s Chauvet. “People want to buy into these iconic lines when they enter the Cartier store,” he says. “It’s not about newness.”

Yet the designs must evolve — and that means adding more to the Cartier vocabulary, such as opals, a stone Karachi formerly disliked. It also means giving designers the freedom to bring themselves into their designs while remaining quintessentially Cartier.

“The more freedom you give to designers, the more they want to prove to you,” Karachi says of her management approach. Although she admits it was “difficult” to give up designing when she was promoted to creative director — “You go from doing something you do very well to being not so good a manager because it isn’t taught,” she says — she never directly alters the studio’s designs. Instead she takes a piece of tracing paper “just to propose an opportunity to be a bit more Cartier”. Often that means subtraction from the initial proposal. With Cartier, says Karachi, “less is more — you need to have only one very, very powerful message”. Designs always begin with a stone. And a designer must approach that stone with “humility”, Karachi says. “The stone is perfect. So we need to be at the level of the stone, to enhance it and be of service to it . . . If you put [in] too many colours, you kill the effect. It’s about finding the right harmony.”

Many brands would like to take Cartier’s crown, LVMH’s Tiffany among them. Analysts say Cartier’s management is “worried” about its rival’s accelerating ambitions, but that Cartier’s revenue growth should continue to outpace Tiffany’s over the next couple of years. Vigneron says he “ignores” the competition. “We do what we think is right [for us]. The problem in luxury is that everyone looks at everyone [else] and at some point everyone [does] the same thing.”

I mention Tiffany’s recent collaborations with Supreme and Nike, and ask whether he thinks jewellery’s more conservative approach to image and marketing will change and become more like fashion’s. “Cartier is not [about] putting two names on a toothbrush or whatever. That’s a gimmick,” he replies. “I also think clients, if they are going to spend a lot of money on a piece, probably want to know they are in a safe pair of hands.”

“The pandemic changed everything for everybody,” he continues. “Has it changed what clients want from Cartier? No, not at all.”

Portraits and model shoot photographed for the FT by Francesca Beltran; model, Maty Ndiaye at W360 Management; stylist, Misha Kratina; hair, Sachiko Yamashita; make-up, Yvane Rocher at Walter Schupfer Management; photographer’s assistant, Cameron Koskas; stylist’s assistant, Ghazal Farzaneh

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