“It’s Insane, Right?” Timothée Chalamet Worked With Cartier on His Custom Candy-Inspired Wonka Necklace
“Invention,” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka famously said in the classic 1971 film, is “93 percent perspiration, six percent electricity, four percent evaporation, and two percent butterscotch ripple”. Now that the chocolate factory is under the purview of a new Wonka, the always fabulously dressed Timothée Chalamet, that recipe looks rather different – if no less fantastical. Formulating his latest internet-shaking red-carpet look, for example, called for one historic Parisian jewelry maison, a sprinkling of vintage references and 450 hours of painstaking work.
The result? The one-of-a-kind, candy-inspired Cartier necklace the modern day matinée idol wore to walk the red carpet at the world premiere of Wonka at London’s Royal Festival Hall tonight. “It’s insane, right?” Chalamet says admiringly of his new accessory, which was fitted precisely to the contours of his throat in order to sit directly against the skin, allowing all 964 of its emeralds, rubellites, pink tourmalines and blue opals to shine. “It’s beyond anything I could have dreamt,” the 27-year-old tells Vogue a day before the screening.
Chalamet, a house ambassador who has been known to wear metallic Tom Ford tailoring with a classic Juste un Clou bracelet, or board shorts with a vintage Tank watch, spent hours combing through archive Cartier imagery before traveling to Paris to meet with Marie-Laure Cérède, creative director of jewelry and watchmaking, at the atelier months before the premiere. “It seems like there was a really expressive period in the ’60s and ’70s when Cartier creations were quite colourful, and really playful, even,” he says of what he took away from his research. “The house has such success with their staples… my one curiosity was what something joyful and playful and youthful would look like under the umbrella of a Cartier creation.” For Cérède, the challenge was to create a unique piece that “fits Timothée”, but was simultaneously “so Cartier that it couldn’t have been done by anyone else”, she explains.
The necklace’s intense pink, vibrant green and milky blue stones certainly reflect Chalamet’s joyful brief, and set the piece apart from the more muted jewelry (a discreetly expensive watch here, a vintage brooch there) we traditionally see men wearing on the red carpet. But then, Timothée has never had any time for “rules” around what men and women should or shouldn’t be wearing. “Absolutely,” he replies emphatically, when I ask if he takes the same genderless approach to jewelry as he does to fashion generally. “Maybe it’s having gone to a performing arts high school in New York, or maybe it’s just the way my mom raised me,” he says. “I’ve always just worn what fits.”
For Chalamet, as we know, “what fits” could extend to a backless Haider Ackermann jumpsuit, a Louis Vuitton harness or, most recently, a lilac Latex Prada suit. Still, the actor insists his tastes are often surprisingly simple. “I’ve always just loved a thin chain,” he says. “You know, even one of the necklaces I wear in Call Me By Your Name… the Star of David is obviously from the book, but another was one I just happened to have bought in Milan one weekend leading up to the movie. Luca [Guadagnino, the film’s director] kept it in.”
