VSt was with a broken heart that Aldo Cipullo, son of a family of Italian jewelers who emigrated to New York, designed in 1969 what would be one of the most famous modern jewels: the Love bracelet by Cartier. An oval, unisex bangle made up of two rigid arcs that can be opened or closed using a screwdriver and which are impossible to put on or take off alone. Men or women, all of Hollywood is infatuated with this bracelet without arabesques or sparkles. Symbol of a love as solid as it is unwavering which, in the midst of the sexual revolution, paradoxically borrows from the world of captivity: the handcuff, of course, or the slave bracelet.
It must be said that jewelry has been a token of love or possession in the West for centuries, which historically could sometimes amount to the same thing. “ The wife poetically testifies to the wealth and power of the husband,” Roland Barthes politely wrote in 1961 in a text entitled “Jewels and Jewels”. In fact, “bracelet”, “rings”, “chain” or “necklace”: the lexical field of jewelry sometimes joins that of detention. Fin de siècle literature and poetry, whose imagination is full of precious stones and where luxury and lust often go hand in hand, were able to draw a parallel between jewelry and irons.
Finery is an essential initial investment for demi-mondaines who shine with their jewels… announcing possible enjoyments. In The Man with the Bracelet (1900), short story by the Parnassian Jean Lorrain, a painter who pretends to be a prostitute attracts the client (whom he fully intends to rob) by displaying at his window his only shaved arm delicately encircled with a bracelet Golden. The poets of the emerging century will soon prefer the raw stone, the pebble, its naked, sharp, infertile appearance to the jewels of the symbolists and decadents.
Times have changed and jewelry with them. They are democratizing. It is the advent of costume jewelry, so dear to Gabrielle Chanel. It is no longer just a question of price. Thus, for Barthes, the jewel submits “to another form of discrimination: that of taste, of which fashion is precisely the judge and guardian”. A reversal of values is then observed: ornaments that are too heavy, too showy are discredited and, “for an expensive piece of jewelry to be in good taste, its richness must be discreet, sober, visible of course, but only to those in the know”. The jewel, however, retains its aura, which undoubtedly owes as much to Eros as to Thanatos. For its iconic cuff Bone designed for Tiffanythe Italian designer Elsa Peretti is said to have been inspired by her childhood escapes to the Roman crypt of the Capuchins, a mythical place which houses the bones of nearly four thousand monks who died between the 16th and 19th centuries.
