Cartier debuts Love Unlimited, a new look for the Love bracelet

Something particular occurred in 1969. Aldo Cipullo, an Italian-born American jewelry designer, supplied the French maison Cartier a bangle he’d dreamt up after a heartbreak. Moved by romantic vagaries, Cipullo sought a jewel that embodied extra everlasting emotions. An oval bracelet shaped of two halves of gold, joined by screws and secured with a screwdriver. This is, after all, the Cartier Love bracelet, maybe the single most well-known piece of designer jewelry in the world.

Cipullo’s design was radical for a variety of causes. First, it utterly bucked the expectation for jewelry to return encrusted with gems. His was a bangle of pure, graphic traces wrought in gold. Second, he tapped into the post-industrial— and presumably postmodern—zeitgeist, leaving unromantic screw markings seen and turning them into a design function in their very own proper. With this, he imbued a hard-edged bangle with tender which means: love, taken not with the nostalgia of the previous, however with the immediacy of the fashionable world.

The success of the Love bracelet barely wants point out. It has turn into the aspirational status-symbol jewel and just about invented the class of the signature stable gold bangle. Debates, to today, persist on whether or not the Love bracelet’s recognition has made it passé, however the query is irrelevant: it’s an icon. In the 56 years because it was launched by Cartier, the Love bracelet has shrunk and grown to a few widths, include a smattering of or full pavés of diamonds, and welcomed a hinge that makes carrying it simpler—however it has, basically, stayed the similar.

That modifications this 12 months with the new Love Unlimited line, the most significant and main evolution of the assortment so far. Its design turns the inflexible type of the basic Love bracelet on its head with a utterly supple new fashion that wraps round, moderately than rests on, the wrist. The new bracelets faucet on a variety of advances in savoir-faire. It took Cartier over 100 prototypes to determine a strategy to be part of sections of gold collectively—over 200 tiny elements join the bracelet on the inside—so the bracelet strikes as fluidly as a ribbon but maintains the pure, graphic line of the Love assortment. To additional improve this purity of line, Cartier designed a new patent-pending invisible clasp tailored from its excessive jewelry creations.

Visually, the Love Unlimited bracelets introduce a recent contact of texture. They undertake the very French element of gadroons, a ribbed ornamental motif, that mixed with excessive polish offers the bracelets an alluring play with mild. They’re designed to put on effectively with different bracelets on the wrist, however maybe the most imaginative facet is that the clasp can mix with different Love Unlimited bracelets. Two, three, 4 or actually extra, may be joined as much as invent new methods of carrying the jewel: a double- or triple-tour bracelet in several colors of gold; looped round the waist as a belt, draped as a necklace, slung throughout the physique and even fitted round the bicep. Just as love can take infinite varieties, the prospects of Cartier’s new jewels are fairly limitless.