The screw and the bolt

Aldo Cipullo, born in Naples in 1935, had designed for David Webb and for Tiffany before he joined Cartier in 1969. He brought with him a bracelet he had drawn after a break-up: a rigid oval of gold closed by two working screws, sold with the small screwdriver that fastens it. The screw heads were its only ornament. Cartier dates the LOVE bracelet to New York that year, and two years later Cipullo bent a gold nail round the wrist.

The toolbox was already open. In 1966 Henri Samuel of FRED had fastened a length of braided steel marine cable with yellow gold and named it Force 10, after a storm on the Beaufort scale. Jean Dinh Van, who joined Cartier in 1950 and opened his own workshop in Paris in 1965, flattened one end of a springy gold bangle into a lock-shaped clasp for Serrure in 1975, then made Menottes the following year, two half-rings that hook together like handcuffs. Tiffany dates the gauge-link bracelet behind its HardWear line to 1962.

Between 1966 and 1976 the hardware was laid out, and the houses have been picking it up ever since. Cartier revived the nail as Juste un Clou in 2012 and threaded hexagonal nuts on a gold cable for Écrou in 2017, the year Tiffany released HardWear. Boucheron shaped a clasp like an audio jack in 2019, the year Cartier set spikes and studs moving against one another in Clash. Tiffany Lock, in 2022, drew the shackle of a padlock round the wrist, going back to a gold padlock brooch the house had made for a couple in 1883.