Fashion

Cartier’s Most Iconic Pieces Are for Keeps

BYMille Team

September 9, 2026

There are very few pieces of jewelry you can recognize from across a room, but Cartier has somehow managed to make quite a few of them. The screws of a LOVE bracelet, the three interlocking bands of Trinity, the bent nail of Juste un Clou, and the studs of Clash de Cartier are familiar to virtually everyone.

But jewelry rarely becomes important to us because of recognition alone. The pieces we keep closest tend to accumulate meaning along the way, becoming attached to people, places, and particular periods of our lives. Eventually, they can occupy the same sentimental territory as an old photograph tucked inside a book, a ticket we cannot bring ourselves to throw away, or something brought home from a trip years ago.

That idea of attachment sits at the center of MILLE’s latest editorial with Cartier. Drawing from visual diaries, contact sheets, and the intimacy of collected memories, the story follows its protagonist through the objects and small rituals that make up her personal world. Photographs appear alongside keepsakes and personal artefacts, while Cartier jewelry becomes part of that collection rather than something separate from it. The pieces are worn, stacked, handled, and kept close.

At the center of it is the LOVE bracelet, which feels particularly suited to the premise. Since Aldo Cipullo designed it in New York in 1969, LOVE has always carried an idea of attachment quite literally. Its rigid oval shape was designed to sit closely against the wrist, while its original two-piece construction had to be fastened using a miniature screwdriver. The bracelet was conceived as something that could remain on the body rather than jewelry constantly taken on and off.

More than five decades later, that familiar silhouette is getting one of its most colorful updates yet. Launched in June, the LOVE Color Capsule introduces six gemstone interpretations of the design. Three are completely pavé-set in blue sapphires, pink sapphires, or green tsavorite garnets, with ten diamonds interrupting the color where the bracelet’s famous screw motifs would ordinarily sit. The remaining versions return to the rainbow, replacing the screws with gradients of colored stones across yellow, rose, and white gold.

Cartier has experimented with multicolored gemstone LOVE bracelets before, with earlier versions featuring combinations of sapphires, garnets, and amethysts becoming particularly sought-after on the resale market. The new capsule takes that idea considerably further, allowing color to occupy much more of the bracelet rather than simply appearing where its screws would normally be.

Within our editorial, those flashes of color sit among some of Cartier’s other signatures, with LOVE stacked alongside pieces from collections including Juste un Clou and Clash de Cartier. Seen together, they also tell another story about the Maison itself. Cartier has spent more than a century creating designs that people develop remarkably personal relationships with, even as the pieces themselves become universally recognizable.

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But while these designs may be recognizable around the world, the experience of owning and wearing them is inevitably personal. One person’s LOVE bracelet might mark an anniversary, while somebody else’s Clash de Cartier ring might have been inherited from their mother. A Tortue watch becomes the one worn every day, while a Juste un Clou bracelet picked up during a particular chapter of someone’s life eventually becomes inseparable from the memories of it.

Our editorial lives within that space. Through collaged photographs, personal artefacts, intimate gestures, and fragments of everyday life, the images build a portrait of their protagonist without needing to explain everything about her. The objects do some of that work themselves. Cartier’s pieces appear among them as the things she reaches for, wears together, and carries forward.

Cartier’s Most Iconic Pieces Are for Keeps

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