Design, culture and jewellery: Cartier in Singapore

Cartier’s iconic Trinity ring turns a youthful 100 this year and to mark the occasion, the French jewellery house has conceived Trinity 100, a commemorative pop-up exhibition, and sent it out on a whistle stop tour that kicked off in Shanghai in July and Singapore a couple of weeks later, with Tokyo in October, and a still secret city in the US in December.

To call the exhibition a pop-up, though - at least, if what we’re seeing in Singapore is any indication - is to do the whole production a disservice.

The exhibition, created by curators including Paris-based artistic director Jérôme Sans and designed by Cartier’s in-house team, artfully weaves a multitude of disciplines - not least, music, sculpture, digital art, couture fashion, video art, photography and even kinetic art - into the history, evolution and design of Trinity.

Spread over seven rooms on the second floor of The Arts House - a handsome fin de siècle riverside pile that was once Singapore’s parliament in the colonial days - the exhibition begins in a striking way with a video broadcast on three stacked semi-circular screens, the story of the three Cartier brothers, Louis, Pierre and Jacques, segueing into sepia-toned photographs of the three flagship boutiques the brothers each headed in Paris, London and New York.

In the next room, an elegant black oval is framed by perfectly lit vitrines that track the Trinity’s design evolution through the decades first as the OG interlocking bands of rose, white and yellow gold, and later reimagined as necklace, bracelet, knuckle-duster, and even cigarette lighter, alongside historical ad campaigns.

The third room is particularly heartfelt - a bijou offbeat tribute made up of cut-out cloud, sketches and projected handwriting to Jean Cocteau who famously wore two Trinity rings on his left pinky and who told the actor, Jean Marais that the first band represented Cocteau, the second, Marais, and the third, their love.

Cartier’s Trinity 100 Pop-Up is currently showing at Singapore’s The Arts House, 15-23 July 2024. https://www.cartier.sg/en-sg/trinity100.html#artworks