George Cramer was pleased to see a stunning new historically inspired Santos-Dumont model in stainless steel at SIHH 2019. And to his Cartier-enamored eye it looks even better than the model from the now-defunct Collection Privée Cartier Paris (CPCP) line.
Why is it that watch brands celebrate watch anniversaries so enthusiastically? The answer isn’t as complicated as you might think . . . here we illustrate the answer with some major brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Cartier, Chanel, and Omega, who celebrated some major watch anniversaries back in 2017.
In the 1968 film ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ Steve McQueen played the title character, a millionaire businessman and avid sportsman involved in a cat-and-mouse game with an insurance claims investigator played by Faye Dunaway. McQueen chose two of his personal watches to wear in the film: an elegant Cartier Tank Cintrée and a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox. But when Nick Gould looked further into this, he discovered that contrary to popular opinion McQueen also surprisingly owned a Tank.
Nineteenth-century French horologist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a man now famous as the father of modern magic, inspired Cartier to begin dabbling in mystery clocks in 1912. And the famous brand has never stopped as a 2018 exhibition showing 19 historical mystery clocks so richly illustrated.
What happens when form dominates function nearly completely and the watch itself becomes a canvas for art? What if artistic freedom can be enjoyed without time being the primary purpose? Martin Green highlights three great examples here.
Diamond-set watches can be objects of art, Martin Green argues. And here he highlights three 2020 launches that caught his eye with their scintillating fire and great use of the precious stones.
Martin Green highlights three new watches that we would have seen for the first time at Watches & Wonders 2020 had the fair run: the new Montblanc Heritage Monopusher Chronograph, the Cartier Santos-Dumont XL, and Roger Dubuis’s Excalibur Twofold that introduces a new material to watchmaking: LumiSuperBiwiNova.
As just about every watch event has been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, Elizabeth Doerr highlights five new watches for women here that we would have seen for the first time at Watches & Wonders 2020.
A grail watch can be pretty much anything. But one thing a grail watch always is is personal. Very personal. Martin Green was introduced to his personal grail watch by a close friend who had recently treated himself to a new watch: a pre-Collection Privée Cartier Paris Louis Cartier Tank in platinum. Here’s the story of how Martin got his grail.
The Cartier Ronde Louis Cartier Regard de Panthère is a stunning mosaic watch that must be seen and handled personally for the full effect. Often jewelry pieces can look stunning on the screen, however Joshua Munchow feels that this piece as a work of art is not best represented in digital pixels but perfectly suited for a real-life experience.