Cartier unveiled 125 new high jewellery creations in a château outside Saint-Tropez last week. Yet among the emeralds, panthers and extraordinary gemstones, it was one necklace that carried the greatest weight of history.
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There’s a moment when you’re looking at a Cartier high jewellery presentation when you stop gazing at the stones and you start seeing the whole story. That’s the idea behind Le Chœur des Pierres, which was revealed to an intimate guest list last week at a Provençal castle outside Saint-Tropez. The name is a French play on ‘chœur’ and ‘cœur’, ‘chorus’ and ‘heart’. Pronounced almost identically, the suggestion is that Cartier listens to the stones first, before ‘playing’ with them in its designs.
Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s Director of Image, Style and Heritage, framed the collection as exactly that:”gems leading the design rather than the other way around”. This is a oft-repeated refrain at many jewellery houses, but with more than 100 years of stone setting behind it, Cartier certainly has the authority to say it.
Le Chœur des Pierres is an enormous undertaking. The collection comprises 125 creations and more than 85,000 hours of work, with Cartier confirming this is only the first of three chapters still to come. Presented at Château de la Croix des Gardes on the French Riviera, the unveiling combined a jewellery presentation, dinner and performance from John Legend, bringing together clients, collectors and ambassadors including Tilda Swinton, Zoe Saldaña, Shu Qi and Virginie Efira.
The highlight of the collection is a necklace called Tutti Kanya, featuring a 30.33-carat engraved Zambian emerald surrounded by carved emeralds, rubies and sapphires arranged as leaves, berries and flowers, finished with a beaded ruby tassel. The tassel can be worn front or back. Cartier describes it, rather carefully, as a piece that “renews the Tutti Frutti style, which has been part of the Maison’s repertoire since the mid-1920s.”
Tutti Frutti is not simply a decorative Cartier signature. It is arguably one of the most important design languages the Maison ever developed and one of the defining aesthetics of 20th century jewellery. The story began with Jacques Cartier’s trips to India to understand and be inspired by Mughal jewellery, particularly the 1911 Delhi Durbar staged for King George V. Cartier was fascinated by what he found: centuries-old techniques for hand-carving gems that produced emerald leaves, sapphire blossoms and ruby berries. Returning to Paris with carved stones from his Indian connections, he juxtaposed them with the clean-edged geometry of emerging Art Deco design. That tension became the entire point of Tutti Frutti.
Organic Mughal carving was combined with rigid, sharp European-centric architecture. By 1925, the style appeared at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exhibition that effectively gave the Art Deco movement its name.
Cartier did not originally call these jewels ‘Tutti Frutti.’ Internally they were often described as “Hindou” jewels or simply ‘pierres de couleur’ compositions. The term Tutti Frutti came years later, as terminology used by collectors and dealers to reference the collection. Cartier didn’t even trademark the name until 1989.
Cartier’s latest Tutti Kanya directly references the defining example of Cartier’s genius, the 1936 Collier Hindou made for Daisy Fellowes. One of the most recognisable of all of Cartier’s high jewellery creations, it features around 200 carved ruby, emerald and sapphire elements suspended in a transformable necklace. Read our story here on Daisy Fellowes jewellery at Cartier’s exhibition at the V&A.
Tutti Kanya’s central carved emerald is a direct descendant of one of the stones Jacques Cartier sourced from India a century ago. The carved leaves and berries around it are from that same piece. Even the ‘tree of life’ motif worked into the reverse of the necklace deliberately echoes the floral symbolism long associated with Cartier’s Tutti Frutti pieces.
But what’s really interesting is the craftsmanship. Tutti Kanya uses a stringing technique rather than rigid mounting, allowing the stones more movement and fluidity. It’s closer to Indian jewellery traditions than anything Cartier have dared to make before. Rather than reproducing vintage Tutti Frutti pieces, Cartier is softening the Art Deco structure that once surrounded them.
The rest of Le Chœur des Pierres is more straightforwardly gemstone-led. A piece called ‘Olorra’ builds graphic geometry around five Colombian emeralds totalling 40.67 carats, with turquoise and lapis reinforcing Cartier’s long-standing fascination with green-blue contrasts. ‘Haryma’ transforms five imperial topazes into a tiger necklace with onyx markings dissolving into an almost pixelated chain. Meanwhile, ‘Panthère Kentia’ places a 50.13-carat cabochon Ceylon sapphire beneath Cartier’s inevitable panther motif.
Then there is ‘Auralis’, perhaps the quietest but most modern piece in the collection, built around six pink diamonds from Australia’s now-closed Argyle mine. Together they total only 1.42 carats, but provenance increasingly matters as much as scale at this level of high jewellery craftsmanship.
Tutti Kanya is the piece people will remember. Not because Cartier has reinvented Tutti Frutti completely, but because the necklace directly references Collier Hindou without copying it. It has refined and redeveloped the style. Cartier understands the weight of history more than most brands. It is never afraid to look back in order to move forward.
Also, Take a closer look at Marilyn Monroe’s jewellery that’s coming to auction soon
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