JEWEL IN THE CROWN
Unless you have recently awoken from a coma or been marooned on a desert island, you have no excuse for being unaware of the house-sized Cartier box that appeared on New Bond Street in London. It covers the front of the historic Cartier shop and is one of the most elegant hoardings to cover a building site. Soon, possibly even by the time you read this, that hoarding will have been removed to reveal a five-storey cathedral honouring the cult of Cartier. It is the biggest thing to happen to Cartier this side of the English Channel for a century — in fact, more than a century, ever since Cartier seduced British high society during the elegant frivolity and douceur de vivre of the Edwardian era.
After the long and austere reign of Queen Victoria, life at court threw off its bombazine gloom. The historian George Peabody Gooch uses the language of fairytales to conjure an evocative image of the Edwardian era that remains fixed in the imagination: “The court now awoke from its winter sleep, for the king loved happy faces and good cheer, and the gracious charm of Queen Alexandra won every heart. No British
