Pierre Rainero, On The Ever-evolving Cartier Clash Collection

Jewellery that responds to the current climate with bite and spike unravels delicious journey to the dark side. Akanksha Kamath speaks with Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s head of heritage and style, on the ever-evolving Cartier Clash collection

- Akanksha Kamath

Can resistance ever be boiled down to one look? Lee McQueen’s Armadillo boot, teetering at 30cm high, Karl Lagerfeld’s leather and chain lined Chanel tweeds, Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace dress held together by needlepoint safety pins—all examples of strategically subtextual fashion, made bold by their sartorial side eyes at the patriarchy/establishment/insert-your-ill-here, of the time

PUNK STYLE WAS ONCE THE SUREST way to rile the public. In 2013, the Met Gala theme was ‘Punk: Chaos To Couture’. It was the chronicling of a style that made its journey from the anger and disenfranchisement of the streets to the world’s most important runways. Today, five decades later, politics and pop culture are once again birthing new strains of punk in fashion.

The house of Cartier stands to illustrate. Time and again, the jewellery maison has subverted luxury. Take, for example, the Juste un Clou (‘just a nail’) which pulled at themes of a very specific spirit of the 1970s, when a contrasting taste for sophistication and casual led to found objects being anointed as art.