The animal

Dame à la Panthère, the advertisement Louis Cartier commissioned from George Barbier in 1913, is thought to be the house's first link with the cat. The next year panther spots appeared on a Cartier ladies' watch designed by Charles Jacqueau. Louis Cartier's name for Jeanne Toussaint was the panther, and after he made her director of fine jewelry in 1933 she gave the animal a body: the first fully sculpted panther, a brooch in gold and enamel, was made for the Duchess of Windsor in 1948.

Other houses keep menageries of their own. Boucheron traces its bestiary to 1866, and Wladimir, its cat, appeared on brooches at the end of the nineteenth century, then wore a high-jewelry necklace in the house's advertising from 1978 to 1987; Claire Choisne gave him pieces of his own in 2018. Van Cleef & Arpels revived the playful animals of its 1950s La Boutique line as Lucky Animals in 2017, clips in malachite, tiger's eye and mother-of-pearl, each looking out with an onyx eye. DoDo opened in Milan in 1994 with one-gram gold charms led by the dodo, the bird lost to extinction, and partnered with WWF that year. Cartier, meanwhile, went on making beasts to order. In 1975 María Félix asked for two crocodiles, one covered with 1,023 yellow diamonds, the other with 1,060 emeralds.