If it weren’t for the fact that it’s one of the most covetable items of jewellery around, it would sound like a terrible idea. A bracelet that’s a nail. Or, perhaps, a nail that’s a bracelet. Yet Cartier’s Juste un Clou is proof not only that everything sounds better in French (when it was launched in 1971 it was called the Nail Bracelet), but that modern luxury can be as much about what you don’t expect as what you do.
In this instance what you expect is the solid gold, and possibly the optional diamonds. What you don’t expect — or, at least, what you wouldn’t expect if this hadn’t become one of the most recognisable entities in the Cartier line-up — is that these precious materials would be reincarnated in the form of something so humdrum, so workaday.
Except the result is, needless to say, anything but. Should you turn up somewhere wearing the top-of-the-range necklace set with 162 diamonds (£98,000, cartier.com), no one is going to mistake you for a chippy come to put up some new shelves.
There’s a kind of slippage between sign and signifier with Juste un Clou that renders the results — be it the original bracelet or the myriad other versions since — inimitably contemporary. And this is the case even though it is more than 50 years since Aldo Cipullo, Cartier’s then designer, came up with the concept.
The same could be said for the less well-known Spanner bracelet Cipullo designed under his own brand name a handful of years later (a gold iteration is available as I write on 1stdibs.com for about £11,500), not to mention his gold and diamond noose charm necklace — a slightly more problematic wear for most of us, I imagine (about £3,500 on the same website).
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Cipullo may not be as celebrated as fashion’s most illustrious surrealist, Elsa Schiaparelli, but when it comes to timelessness he knocks even her off her considerable pedestal. It’s because he splices surrealism with another -ism — minimalism. Schiaparelli is best remembered for her clothes, of course, but she extrapolated many of the same themes in her jewellery, be it a lobster brooch or a pendant of pearl peas in a gold pod. These are wonderful items but they are also period pieces.
There is nothing period about Juste un Clou. To this day there’s a punkishness to its aesthetic, even though it anticipated the actual punk movement by several years. It’s more in line with the work of another surrealist, Meret Oppenheim, whose fur teacup and spoon of 1936 could have been conjured yesterday as well as, somehow, many centuries ago.
Oppenheim sought out symbols with a “fluid and changeable impact”, she once stated, and the same could be said of Cipullo. Another similarity between their work? That there is that ancient, almost fabular quality to their creations — a sense that they come with a story.
The narrative behind Cipullo’s famous other creation for Cartier, the Love bracelet, is clear. It must be screwed together with a special screwdriver, and was originally conceived as a his-and-hers purchase. Meaning? You and your lover are locked in.
What’s the story to Juste un Clou? Perhaps there isn’t one. But it makes me think of that Brothers Grimms fairytale, The Nail. The moral of that story, also summarised in a proverb by George Herbert, was: “For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.”
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What the Juste un Clou implies is that everything is, merci bien, nicely nailed down.
