The ring that Romy Scheider, Grace Kelly and Jean Cocteau fell in love with turns one hundred years old

Three is the number that resonates most in Cartier's history.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
07 May 2024 Tuesday 10:32
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The ring that Romy Scheider, Grace Kelly and Jean Cocteau fell in love with turns one hundred years old

Three is the number that resonates most in Cartier's history. There were three founders, Louis, Jacques and Pierre. Three historic boutiques, Paris, London and New York. And three is the perfect number for the house and the detail that changes everything. That very personal Trinity, that design that is reduced to the essentials to gain all the magic. Three rings in three different golds in a communion that makes them extremely discreet but instantly recognizable. That magical trinity, the most emblematic of the house, has completed one hundred years without being exhausted. On the contrary. Redefining yourself. Searching and finding its space with new designs and XL versions to become a contemporary icon.

It all began in 1924, when the house launched that unique ring linking three mobile rings of platinum, yellow gold and rose gold in a poetic and technical enigma. Legend has it that Louis Cartier invented the maximum fluidity of mobile rings (round on the outside, smooth on the inside) that overlap and assemble lightly as a gift for his friend Jean Cocteau.

Yes but no. Because although the intellectual was one of the first to wear it, it was not designed especially for him. If this groundbreaking design arrived, it was because Louis Cartier was fully immersed in that Paris in full artistic and cultural ferment dominated by the aesthetics of art deco and giving way to the first surrealist outbursts. Romy Schneider, Cary Grant, Alain Delon and Grace Kelly were also great ambassadors of this piece (which was also launched as a bracelet) with which Louis Cartier unknowingly launched the unisex world.

If Trinity has never stopped being an icon and shines with special intensity today, when more than unisex, we are already going for agender, it is because from her first day she fell in love with men and women alike.

To celebrate that long history, the house has redesigned its trinity. In three versions, of course. There is a pendant, bracelet and ring for this new stage in which the extra size of the 2000s has been recovered in its triple ring that hides or shows the diamonds, depending on the play of the intertwined pieces, and has introduced for the first time a version with rounded corners, or in the shape of a cushion. This new shape is what the artistic director of the firm, Laure Cérède, has named Trinity Cushion. “It seemed laughable, impossible to redesign an icon, but that was precisely what drove us.” And there you have it. The icon is more alive than ever and shines brighter than before.