Features

Watches: Shaping time

1 Apr 2016 by BusinessTraveller

Cartier’s latest creation is typical of a company that has pushed the boundaries of watch form over the decades, says Timothy Barber

It’s a relatively rare event that Cartier, the watch world’s great stylist, launches an entirely new style of wristwatch. But having done so last year, with the 1970s-inspired Clé de Cartier, it did so again this January, which is the equivalent of the proverbial two buses coming along at once after a long wait.

This year’s addition intrigued for a number of reasons: it’s called the Drive, although it doesn’t express any obvious connection to motoring; unusually for Cartier, it’s being launched exclusively as a men’s watch; and just what the heck shape is it anyway?

It falls into the category known as “cushion-shaped” watches: almost a square, almost octagonal, somewhere in between – it is its own, Cartier Drive shape. And that makes sense because, above anything else, creativity with shapes is what has always been Cartier’s horological calling card.

Over the decades, it has squeezed and pulled the watch into a great diversity of elegant forms, with names such as Tortue (elaborated barrel shaped), Baignoire (oval), Santos (square) and, most famously, the Tank (rectangular), all with the same Belle Epoque dial identity of blued hands and black Roman numerals against a white, guilloché-engraved background.

Cartier’s is a style as identifiable as that of Rolex, and as cultivated and graceful as you’d expect from the grande maison of Parisian jewellery. That’s just as it was back in the early 20th century when, as recounted in the previous issue of this magazine, Louis Cartier produced a square wristwatch for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont – possibly the first watch designed specifically for the wrist.

The Santos (as it came to be marketed, and still is) was just the start. One of three brothers who established the family business as a global luxury powerhouse, Louis was a visionary. In particular, it is his highly inventive attitude to watch design that has remained his great legacy.

His most celebrated coup was the Tank, a rectangular watch that appeared in 1919, whose elongated flanks, neatly holding the strap in place – strap attachment being an early obstacle as watches moved from the pocket to the wrist – meant it resembled the “tanks” that had so recently rumbled across the battlefields of Flanders. The nickname stuck and the Tank, in a multitude of forms, has, like the Santos, endured, and is a symbol of art deco sophistication that’s an essential to any budding watch collection.

Of all the Cartier shapes to have appeared over the decades, the most eccentric must be the Crash, which now comes in a luxurious skeletonised form. Early in the 1960s, a Cartier Baignoire, the maison’s celebrated oval watch, was found mangled and half-melted in the wreckage of a car crash in London. The resulting shape itself became a watch whose avant-garde asymmetry, and name, remains an audacious symbol of that era’s creative spirit.

You can, of course, get a round watch from Cartier, the primary example being the Ballon Bleu, the smooth contours of which give it the feel of a pebble in your hands. Personally, I’m not sure Louis Cartier would approve of something so obvious.

Of the Clé, which reimagines a 1970s sports watch as a contemporary luxury object with a novel “key” style of winding crown, one feels he’d have more regard – although, of the new styles, it’s the Drive I think he’d plump for. It comes in steel or gold, with a grey or white dial, and in either a simple time-only form, or with a moon phase and power reserve indicators; there’s also a spectacular haute horlogerie version with a C-shaped tourbillon.

Cartier has lacked a dedicated men’s watch in its collections; the Drive has an attractive boldness and presence to meet the brief, without losing the elegant identity established by Louis Cartier a century ago.

Timothy Barber is editor of QP magazine.

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