THE TRINITY RING IS THE STAR OF AN EPHEMERAL COLLECTION
The collaboration between Cartier and Chitose Abe, founder of sacai, resulted in the creation of six new limited-edition pieces.
Trinity de Cartier, A DESIGN ICON
Chitose Abe
What does the design of the Trinity ring mean to you? What was your view of it before this project, and what did you like about it?
My ambition has always been to explore the most successful, most radical objects there are, and to use them to make something new, working around the purest iteration of the design – its archetype – by choosing those that are the most successful in their category. For me, Cartier is just that: the purest, most essential and most timeless creator of jewelry forms.
Can you tell us about your relationship with Cartier? About the creation process?
My work has always been something very personal – I play with shapes that I have always admired or worn. My personal experience with Cartier started with my Love bracelet, which I wore for a very, very long time, and recently with the Écrou de Cartier bracelet. I love the story of the Trinity, which is very near and dear to my personal values and to the values I want for Sacai: love, loyalty and friendship, which I consider to be the most important things in life, values around which I have tried to build my life and my work.
And how would you define this new collection?
I was struck by the timeless simplicity of Trinity’s original shape, as well as by the fact that a nearly 100-year-old creation still seems so modern and contemporary. Just as how I approach clothing, I explored how the form changes with movement – the distance between the rings serving as a metaphor for the tension between the values of loyalty. I captured it as if it were moving, to create something new out of something familiar and known.
collaboration
This collaboration between Cartier and Chitose Abe took shape in Japan in June 2019, when Cyrille Vigneron, President and CEO of Cartier International, and the Sacai founder, who have been close for several years, began to reflect on a creative exploration of Trinity. A year later, their exchanges led to the presentation of an initial prototype by the Cartier Jewelry Studio, with which Chitose Abe conversed through sketches and ideas.
After these exchanges, the designer selected ten designs that best reflected her vision and shared them with Cyrille Vigneron. In October 2020, Chitose Abe visited Paris in order to meet with the Cartier Jewelry Studio designers and to inspect and try on the selected prototypes, which were approved six months later.
THE TRINITY RING
The TRINITY FOR CHITOSE ABE of Sacai collection is, first and foremost, a collaboration between designer Chitose Abe and the creation studios of the Maison. Cartier’s designers drew on the simplicity and mobility of the Trinity ring to better deconstruct and reinvent it, in order to achieve an entirely new harmony. They explored the ring’s creative elements through six modular pieces with transformations that completely revisit the way they are worn without ever losing sight of elegance.
collection
Two rings, a bracelet, a choker, an earring and a versatile piece that is both an earring and a ring: each time, Trinity never fails to astonish. White gold, yellow gold, rose gold: the famous color trilogy of the three rings is ever present. What changes is the shape, the distortion of the rings, their positioning on the skin and their function.
