The garland style (style guirlande) is the name given to the light, open, lace-like aesthetic that Cartier developed and perfected in the decade or so around 1900. It takes its name from the garlands of flowers and ribbons that appear as recurring motifs in the jewellery of this period: swags of blossoms, tied bows, foliate wreaths, and delicate festoons rendered in diamonds and coloured stones against an almost transparent metalwork ground.
The garland style was made technically possible by the adoption of platinum as a setting metal. Before platinum, fine jewellery was typically set in gold, a relatively soft, warm-toned metal with limited capacity for the very slender settings needed to create an open, lacy structure. Platinum, which is harder, whiter, and capable of being drawn into far finer structures without risk of bending or breaking under the weight of stones, allowed jewellers to reduce the visible metal to an absolute minimum. The result was jewellery of a new kind: settings so fine that the metal almost disappeared, leaving the stones appearing to float in an almost weightless construction.
Louis Cartier understood the garland style as a return to older jewellery traditions combined with the technical means of the modern era, rejecting the heavy gold mounts of the mid-nineteenth century in favour of something lighter, more refined, and more closely analogous to fine lace or embroidery. The creative sensibility behind this development is explored further in Louis Cartier and the Cartier Style.
Tiaras were the grandest application of the technique, requiring hundreds of stones set in frameworks of platinum so open that the whole structure could tremble with movement, imitating the delicacy of fabric. Surviving examples include Cartier's Garland Style Tiara, The Cartier London Halo Tiara, and a Cartier Tiara in the V&A Museum.
The garland style gave way to the more geometric Art Deco aesthetic in the 1920s, but it was never entirely abandoned and continues to influence Cartier's high jewellery production.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 2 (“Louis, 1898–1919”) and ch. 5 (“Stones Paris: Early 1920s”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 34, 42 et al.
