UNTAMED HEART

Fierce fauna and fragile flora come to life in Cartier’s latest Nature Sauvage high jewellery collection, unveiled in Singapore.

- YANNI TAN

“She is only interested in creatures that cannot be tamed,” said Michel Aliaga, Cartier’s director of transmission, history and patrimony. Sometimes, no amount of marketing literature can bring out the essence of a collection better than an in-house expert.

“It is their wildness she’s fascinated with,” he added during our casual conversation at Cartier’s recent global launch of the third and final chapter of its Nature Sauvage high jewels.

By “she”, he meant Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier’s legendary muse and creative director in the 1900s, who is the mother of the “panthere” that became a jewellery emblem not just synonymous with the house, but one that is the world’s most recognisable today.

And the topic of Toussaint had cropped up during an “Art of Stringing” workshop, where a group of us were busy trying our hand at Peranakan beading of two beloved Cartier motifs of the panthere and flamingo.

Helming the experience was Aliaga, who took us through the maison’s high jewellery savoir faire in beadwork, alongside a Peranakan mother-and-daughter pair of embroidery experts from Malacca, in a French-meets-Asian cultural showcase that this launch event was themed upon.

And the setting, on this balmy afternoon, could not have been better: A second-storey salon in the Former Command House, ensconced within a forest-lined Bukit Timah estate. Downstairs, in an intimate exhibition set against a backdrop of Peranakan art and Singapore-inspired motifs, we caught the first glimpses of Cartier’s latest expressions of beasts both feral and fantastic.

INTO THE JUNGLE