Vanessa Kirby Is Cartier's New Panthère
The story of how the panther came to be Cartier’s mascot is now jewelry legend. If you aren’t familiar with it, all you really need to know is one name: Jeanne Toussaint. Or “La Panthère,” as Louis Cartier called his muse and lover, whom he hired in 1913 to oversee accessories for the house. By 1933 she had been promoted to director of Cartier’s jewelry department, a post she held for 37 prolific years. Toussaint embodied the feline spirit in style (a full-length panther fur coat was her signature) and sensibility (the singularity of her oeuvre speaks for itself). And with the keys to the maison, she would take her obsession to new three-dimensional heights.
Her first high jewelry panther made its debut in 1948, the wildcat rendered in gold, diamonds, and onyx and perched atop a 116.74-carat emerald. The brooch was for the Duchess of Windsor, and the moment would mark the beginning of not just Wallis Simpson’s love affair with the feline motif but the rest of the world’s. Seventy-five years later the panther is as alluring as ever, perpetually reinvented in interpretations both naturalistic and abstract, in its OG emerald, onyx, and diamond combination, and also in rose gold and rubellite, chrysoprase and aquamarine. In 2014 its essence was distilled into a perfume, a classic chypre that pays homage to beast (velvety musk) and its habitat (gardenia).
“I think it’s so great for women to be asked, even unconsciously, to incarnate that and to step into that power,” says Vanessa Kirby, who joins the menagerie as the new face of Cartier Panthère jewelry, watches, and perfumes. “What does it look like if you tap into the wildness? Will you make different choices?”
La Panthère Parfum
$111.00
cartier.com
It’s a philosophy the actress has long applied to her own craft. “I’m always leaning into something that is wild and uncomfortable. I don’t think we need to be polite in our choices as women anymore, because we spent so long being required to be,” she says. “I ask myself, ‘Could I be more fearless?’” Take her nuanced portrayal of Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown, which shattered the perception that princesses have it easy. Or when she plumbed the depths of grief to play a mother who loses her baby in Pieces of a Woman, a part that earned her an Oscar nomination. This summer Kirby reprises her role as the White Widow, a slinky arms broker, in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. And she soon returns to a royal court, this time as Empress Joséphine in Napoleon, opposite Joaquin Phoenix.
As she does with each job, Kirby went deep into research mode ahead of filming the campaign for La Panthère. Naturally, all roads led back to Toussaint. “I can imagine how radical it was to have a wild animal be representative of female energy,” she says. “She was doing that nearly a hundred years ago. That, to me, felt really authentic.”
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