“To shock was necessary to me,” mentioned Marie-Laure Cérède. The jewelry and watchmaking inventive director of Cartier is video-calling from Paris; on her finger, a tiered ring provides off a mild golden glow. And it’s this jewel – alongside numerous necklaces and bracelets – that Cérède dreamt as much as shock many with. As a result of Grain de Café, the heritage model’s second high-quality jewelry assortment dedicated to a naturalistic theme following the profitable Cactus de Cartier, is centred on the espresso bean. 

At Cartier, casting on a regular basis gadgets from status supplies has historical past – Juste Un Clou designs come to thoughts, as do the screws that element the Love bracelet – and so has the espresso bean. It was Cartier’s genre-defining inventive director Jeanne Toussaint who first added the espresso bean to the home’s stylistic vocabulary in 1938. Many gems adopted, notably through the Fifties and Sixties; amongst them, a set of necklace and matching earrings beloved by Princess Grace of Monaco. 

Anchored in Cartier’s biography, Cérède’s Grain de Café nonetheless is something however nostalgic. “We didn’t need it to be literal, we wished it to be trendy, up to date,” she mentioned. “And we wished this to be a multisensory assortment.” Completed by the model’s expert makers, there may be technical virtuosity to Grain de Café gems. In rings and bracelets, clusters and rows of rectangular shapes – the beans – are mounted on a totally braided chain solid from two sorts of gold. The impact is each tactile and auditory, as every form follows motion. The result’s a musical, rattling sound, one Cérède as we speak likens to the “rustling of leafs within the autumn”. 

Whereas some items are labored with diamonds and sculpted obsidian, Grain de Café is a gold assortment first. Yellow, white and rose gold options. “One of many challenges we’ve got – and that I need us to have – is to introduce what I name ‘a brand new preciousness’,” Cérède defined. “What I imply is that we’ve got been creating with only one materials, gold. It’s far more advanced than working with completely different stones, a variation of colors. Right here, you’ve solely gold and we play with mild, with engraving, with quantity and with completely different finishes to create one thing very valuable.” 

On my laptop computer display, Cérède now strikes on to one in every of her new bracelets, turning the jewel round and shifting it nearer to her digicam lens. “From each angle, every thing on this assortment is gorgeous,” she mentioned. “I name it the luxurious of invisible particulars. It’s not solely what you’ll be able to see, it’s additionally about what you’re feeling.”