Cartier Juste un Clou Bracelet
$3995.00
Made of 18K yellow gold, this is the “small” model in a size 17. Its representative of a shift toward luxury jewelry that could be worn day or night, blurring the lines between masculine and feminine, casual and formal.
Juste un Clou (French for "Just a Nail") is one of the most recognizable and rebellious luxury jewelry designs in history. It completely re-imagined what could be considered "precious" by turning a mundane industrial hardware item into high fashion.
Today Cartier offers similar un Clous’ at $4,180 USD, which makes this timeless piece a wise investment.
The design was created in 1971 by Italian jewelry designer Aldo Cipullo for Cartier New York. By taking a symbol of manual labor— the tool of the working-class carpenter - and casting it in 18k solid gold for the elite, he was playfully mocking traditional high society.
For the forty years following, Cartier did not offer the Juste un Clou until a relaunch to celebrate Cartier’s 165th anniversary. Further refined from 2012, this piece is the most recent evolution - a thinner, flexible version with no mechanism at all. It relies on the natural elasticity of the gold to twist open and snap back onto the wrist.
Founded in Paris in 1847 by Louis-François Cartier, it was his three grandsons — Louis (Paris), Pierre (New York), and Jacques (London) — who built it into an empire. In 1917, Pierre secured Cartier's Manhattan flagship through one of history's most memorable deals: he traded a $1 million double-strand pearl necklace plus $100 cash to railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant, whose young wife had coveted it, in exchange for Plant's neo-renaissance mansion on 5th Avenue — a building that still stands today as the iconic Cartier New York Fifth Avenue Mansion.
Before Cartier, men only wore pocket watches; In 1904 Louis solved the problem by creating a flat, square watch with leather straps to be worn on the wrist. Then in the 1920s and 30s Jacques’ trips to India inspired an Art Deco breakthrough. Cartier took the traditional Indian technique of carving emeralds, rubies, and sapphires into floral shapes and set them into platinum and diamond bases.
Today owning a Cartier piece is owning a slice of history.
This object is a private collection offering - one owner, purchased directly from a Cartier Boutique, and gently worn less than a handful of times.
