Cartier has named Tilda Swinton its new global ambassador for the Into the Wild high jewellery collection, a role that mirrors her chameleon-like screen presence. The collection expands Cartier’s famed animal universe with sculptural rings and sets featuring a tiger, parrot, carp, crocodile and rhinoceros, each meticulously hand-crafted to balance lifelike anatomy with wearable artistry.
If you're a Tilda Swinton fan, you'd agree that she's a bit of a chameleon. I mean it in the best way possible. Take the 82-year-old male psychoanalyst Dr. Josef Klemperer in Suspiria for example, played by a reclusive man named Lutz Ebersdorf nobody had heard of. A few months after the movie released, it was revealed that the old man was none other than Swinton herself. Even in The Grand Budapest Hotel, aged eighty years under a coat of liver spots, she's barely recognisable as herself.
And so it makes perfect sense that for their Into The Wild high jewellery collection, Cartier named Tilda Swinton as their newest global ambassador. After all, who can accurately represent the thrill of the unknown when you step into the wild as well as Swinton?
Animals have long been a mainstay at Cartier, dating back to the early 1900s, when birds and insects first started turning up in the house's jewellery. Reptiles, big cats, and chimeras followed, then a zebra, an elephant, and eventually the animal that ate all the rest: the Panther, now almost synonymous with the Cartier name.
Into the Wild adds five new creatures to this family tree: a tiger, a parrot, a carp, a crocodile, and a rhinoceros, each turned into a sculptural ring under the Faune et Flore de Cartier line. This is part of what the house is calling its Gallery of Animal Portraits. Check out the campaign below:
Each animal head is chiselled by hand and built from fused metals, the parrot alternating platinum and yellow gold, the rhinoceros mixing polished and brushed white gold to chase its real hide. Calibrated sapphires are laid on rails to fake the texture of a tiger's coat or a crocodile's scales. The tiger ring uses a galuchat-effect technique.
You could practically lose yourself in the details. The rhino's horn is carved from opalescent smoky quartz and edged with a single line of black lacquer. The carp's gills are cut from dumortierite quartz. The parrot's feather tuft, coral and onyx, is entirely hand-adjusted, piece by piece. On the crocodile and tiger bracelet-and-necklace sets, the head is built close to real anatomy while the body anatomy is fully abstract, in order to ensure that the bracelet sits well on a human arm. The head convinces you it's an animal, the body reminds you it's jewellery.
As Pierre Rainero, the house's director of image, style and heritage, puts it: "Each creature, each creation reveals its own symbolic force." It's a tidy line for a press release, and also the only honest way to describe a collection this specific about which stone gets to be which animal's eye.
Perhaps this is where Swinton fits into Into The Wild most naturally. She has spent much of her career inhabiting the unfamiliar, whether that means disappearing beneath prosthetics, slipping between genders and generations, or simply making the strange feel entirely at home.