Francesca Cartier-Brickells Buch „Die Cartiers“ | EUROtoday

So some households have secrets and techniques within the basement. In the case of the Cartier household, that is meant fairly actually, as a result of Francesca Cartier Brickell's e-book “The Cartiers”, by which she traces the origins of the jewellery empire, begins with a stroll into the vault. For her grandfather Jean-Jacques Cartier's ninetieth birthday, she explored his wine warehouse searching for champagne, however discovered a dusty suitcase with “faded stickers from Paris train stations and exotic hotels from the Far East.” Inside had been stacks of letters, neatly held collectively by threads whose authentic colours might solely be guessed at, time had taken such a toll on them. The writing was nonetheless simple to learn. It instructed of the glamor and luxurious of previous a long time, but in addition of strokes of destiny and the fears of the Cartier brothers, which they shared with their relations by put up.

This suitcase with its stacks of letters was the set off for a protracted analysis. The granddaughter of the final jeweler within the Cartier household started to work on the household historical past. And since household and enterprise can’t be separated, her e-book additionally tells the story of the rise of a craftsman's assistant within the nineteenth century, who initially expanded his enterprise right into a small Parisian household enterprise and shortly provided Europe's topped heads.

Excursions on the fashion of the totally different eras

The title Cartier has turn into a synonym for very stunning, very costly jewellery: Marilyn Monroe breathed the title within the music “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,” Tallulah Bankhead sacrificed her diamond bracelet as fishing bait with a martyr's gesture in Hitchcock's “The Lifeboat” (“We have Cartier”), and in “Ocean's 8” eight thieves attempt to steal an costly necklace from Anne Hathaway – from Cartier, in fact.

Brickell traces the lengthy path to such fame intimately, repeatedly excursing the fashion of the totally different eras and particular person items of jewellery (such because the well-known Tank watch or the panther as a motif on brooches and bracelets), and on the finish there are extra greater than 100 pages with bibliographic references, indexes and chronological tables.

Entertaining anecdotes

Brickell, who studied English literature at Oxford and now works as a monetary analyst, delivers an nearly novel-like narrative of the lives of the Cartier generations. She appears to be like on the structural elements of the commerce in treasured stones and metals and weaves modern historic, political and financial backgrounds into the narrative circulate. When it involves Jacques' journey to India in 1911, you study quite a bit concerning the totally different sense of fashion between Indian and European aristocratic households: “In Paris and London the women wore the jewelry, in the East the men bought them for themselves. And they wanted to no subtle bracelets, no feminine necklaces or tiny diamond-encrusted cocktail watches. They wanted jewels fit for a prince.” We additionally study why pearls from the Persian Gulf had been notably wanted at Cartier: “Since the opening of the South African diamond mines, the price of pearls had skyrocketed compared to diamonds “They were now much rarer.”

Of course, the e-book continues to give attention to the model's repute, because it tells of glamour, glitter and drama in entertaining anecdotes, with all types of sidelong glances at outstanding purchasers. In addition to the letters, the writer used articles and books about former clients for her analysis, tracked down former workers of Cartier branches and interviewed her grandfather Jean-Jacques Cartier, who belonged to the fourth era of the corporate and was the final of his era managed a department earlier than the corporate was bought within the Nineteen Seventies.

In the 4 chronologically structured components, which start with the corporate's beginnings in Paris in 1819, Jean-Jacques' recollections could be discovered time and again, framed and italicized as an insert – as if he had needed so as to add one thing to his granddaughter's story by hand. Sometimes he experiences that his father let him work within the horse stables for a summer season – “Once you've seen how much work goes into something, you're more likely to appreciate it” – generally he reveals how discreet the sellers needed to be with the intention to hold the presents for his or her purchasers' affairs secret from their wives: “Instead of only a buyer card for the person who purchased the jewellery, there have been additionally further playing cards for the recipients. The goal was to keep away from the sellers babbling on. Anyone who spent some huge cash on jewellery additionally purchased into the discretion.

But the times when Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor frequently drove as much as Cartier to purchase jewellery and queues of onlookers forming on the store window in New York who needed to catch a glimpse of the diamond that the movie diva had bought are over. Anyone who walks the crimson carpet at present wears necklaces and earrings borrowed from the jeweler. Accordingly, Brickell ends her treatise with the founding household's exit from the enterprise and the sale of Cartier to a syndicate in 1974 – and so “The Cartiers” stays a glance again at a world that now not exists.

Francesca Cartier Brickell: “The Cartiers”. A household and their empire. Translated from English by Frank Sievers. Insel Verlag, Berlin 2023. 700 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €34.