Last year, the director famous for Lost in Translation needed to be close to Frankenstein star Jacob Elordi to say something true about love. Sofia Coppola, who directed him as Elvis in Priscilla, photographed him in New York for Cartier's LOVE Unlimited bracelet, deliberately unpolished over a romantic weekend with the skyline in the window yet nowhere to be.
Now, the lens passes to someone even closer. Isabella Elordi, who documented that shoot behind the scenes, steps into the frame to photograph her brother, Jacob, in an intimate, sensory series.
"There is a unique connection in photographing my brother," she says, describing an ease that lets something honest emerge.
It suits an actor whose range runs from the feverish glamour of Saltburn to the tragic grandeur of Frankenstein, and who wears tailoring with unforced ease. It suits Cartier too, a house that has long favoured quiet confidence over spectacle.
The collection itself widens an idea born in New York in 1969, when designer Aldo Cipullo made love a freedom, fastened with a screw. The new necklace unfurls like a golden ribbon, its fluid gadrooned links interspersed with the signature screws. It comes in rose gold, yellow gold or rhodium-plated white gold, and is made to drape and move with the body.
The bracelets are the real surprise. In place of the screws sit 0.80-carat round diamonds, held in a screw-shaped white gold setting, even on the rose and yellow gold versions. The stones gain brilliance while the LOVE vocabulary stays intact. Each piece is assembled from 200 miniaturised components, every one polished by hand, and an invisible, patented clasp lets the diamond bracelet join another, so you can pair, layer and mix with the original all-gold design as you please.
The campaign, shot in Paris, follows a couple along the Seine, a river that unspools like a ribbon and a fitting metaphor for infinity.
That is the point of LOVE Unlimited. Love must be felt and worn as it can hardly be staged or merely displayed.