Cartier: The exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia

The Cartier exhibition, aptly subtitled From royal style to Hollywood glamour, assembles more than 300 Cartier objects of many types of jewellery to various timepieces and paraphernalia associated with smoking, from a time when smoking was still considered a fashionable activity.

Although jewellery has been around for about as long as the human species, it was in the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution that jewellery shrugged off its exclusivity and was mass produced for the burgeoning middle classes. In a move to counter this democratisation, a number of artistic commercial firms sprung up that produced high-quality jewellery that targeted the pockets and tastes of the prosperous bourgeois class and remnants of the aristocracy. Their tastes were fairly conservative, favouring exquisite craftsmanship, expensive exotic materials and usable objects that could be worn for public display.

The House of Fabergé was founded in St Petersburg in 1842 and employed a greater variety of precious and semiprecious stones in the history of jewellery than anyone before it. It attained great fame for its jewel-encrusted Easter eggs and other luxury objects that received widespread recognition at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. In 1837, in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Charles Lewis Tiffany established a "stationery and fancy goods emporium" that was rebadged as Tiffany and Company in New York in 1853 and focused on exquisite jewellery and silverware inspired by the Art Nouveau style.

Louis-Francois Cartier founded in Paris in 1847 a firm that became known as Cartier, which became renown for its exemplary workmanship in jewellery and watch making. He boasted that he could satisfy the most extravagant tastes and became a favourite of Princess Mathilde, the cousin of Napoleon III, and through her patronage the door opened to Parisian high society. In 1874 Alfred Cartier took over from his father and subsequently moved the firm to rue de la Paix, one of Paris's most expensive streets, which was known as the street of luxury. The brand became famous and the business expanded with a branch opening in London in 1902 and another in New York in 1909.

Cartier for a very long time was a family-operated firm that built up a personal relationship with many famous clients who included Dame Nellie Melba, the English royals (from 1901, when Edward VII bought his first piece), Hollywood starlets, international socialites as well as numerous nouveaux riches clients. By 1968, Cartier moved from being a family concern to a multinational organisation and in 1972 a financial syndicate, led by Joseph Kanoui, bought Cartier Paris. Soon London and New York were acquired and reintegrated into the Cartier empire and in 1983 the company launched a campaign to buy back some of its historical pieces to create a collection that would bear witness to its illustrious heritage.

Loans from the Cartier collection form the basis of this exhibition, together with strategic loans from private collections, including from that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and from the Princely Palace of Monaco.

The National Gallery of Australia has produced an exceptionally effective and dramatic display where showcases of precious jewels have a luminous lure and on the surrounding walls are images of the worthy subjects decked out in the jewels shown nearby. The Ballets Russes, Dame Nellie Melba, the royals and film celebrities grace the walls of this spacious exhibition, where the relatively small-scale exhibits inevitably result in crowding around the display wall cabinets. The lavish and scholarly catalogue is essential reading for the show, although I was frustrated in being unable to find most of the captions identifying the figures shown wearing the Cartier products.

The stylistic development of the jewellery as narrated in the exhibition, is from the earlier garland-styled jewellery – with flowers, leafy branches and baskets – reflecting both Art Nouveau and the Edwardian tastes, through to the Art Deco style in the inter-war years. Here there was a mixture of the exotic and erotic fantasies, where the empire plundered poorly understood motifs from Egypt, India, China, Japan and the Islamic world. An important development in Cartier garland-style jewellery was the way their craftsmen wove platinum into extremely fine threads and in this manner enhanced the sparkling quality of the diamonds.

The Cartier jewellers specialised in very fine craftsmanship where the flood of diamonds from South Africa was set into platinum or heavy gold settings and the resulting encrusted tiaras, necklaces, brooches and luxury objects bore the Cartier stylistic hallmark. Their range of Tutti Frutti jewellery mixed rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds to make a polychrome statement of exuberance.

Cartier also manufactured watches that were small and elegant and by owning their distribution outlets, unlike other watch makers, they could stay abreast and manipulate the fluctuating fashion trends. Whereas consensus was that gentlemen wore the classic pocket watch, the stylish Cartier wristwatches gradually changed the accepted social and fashion standards. Cartier also led the field for fashionable accessories for smoking tobacco with cigarette cases, cigarette holders and ashtrays, all encrusted and exquisitely worked in detail.

The exhibition holds great store in who wore what and on what occasion, for example, a diamond Halo tiara given to Her Majesty at the age of 18 and subsequently worn by Catherine Middleton at her wedding to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge in 2011. Likewise linking the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Maria Félix (a Mexican actress) and Elizabeth Taylor to particular items of jewellery. Personally, I find more interesting the marketing strategies of Cartier, where they set new benchmarks for items of social desirability and carefully manipulated ideas of stylishness amongst the wealthy elite.

This is an exhibition of dazzling excess, where the Queen's great pink diamond brooch, Grace Kelly's engagement ring and Elizabeth Taylor's ruby and diamond necklace, are subsumed within a glittering haze of a thousand diamonds.

Cartier: The exhibition is on at the National Gallery of Australia until July 22, 2018.