Our Morning with Cartier

There’s really nothing like the Cartier meeting at Watches & Wonders. Along with Rolex and Patek Philippe, Cartier can be thought of as an anchor brand of the show. They have one of the largest booth spaces, with nonstop foot traffic, and a veritable army of cheery employees who are happy to show you watch, after watch, after watch in your meeting. It’s a seemingly never-ending parade of beautiful objects. To me, that’s what an event like this is all about. Why are we here if not to gawk? In terms of sheer volume, Cartier is your best bet for that. 

What’s wonderful about Cartier, though, is that the beautiful objects aren’t necessarily completely unobtainable, and the brand works hard to make even the most head turning pieces feel approachable (at least in the context of the show). While you’ll see your fair share of unique pieces and watches that have no listed price because if you have to ask, well, you know how it goes, there are accessible ways into the brand that give you plenty of what is essential about Cartier. 

My favorite example of this for 2024 is a new dial variant for the Santos, in a metallic brown with a gradient effect. It’s lovely, and pretty clearly meant to evoke something that has aged naturally over a period of many years. It’s available as both a large and medium Santos, but it’s very clear that the medium is the “correct” size for this watch. It works considerably better when it’s a little more discreet. 

It joins a growing Santos collection that now features dials in green, blue, silver, black, as well as more exotic skeletonized options. The brown though is just a bit unusual and felt particularly striking to me. Green and blue, of course, are fairly standard colors these days that few bat an eye at, but brown begs for attention, and in this case it really won me over. 

The other big release in the Santos family this year was a total surprise and leans more heavily into the avant-garde. The Santos Dumont Rewind appears, at first blush, to be a very nicely executed Santos Dumont with a deep red dial in a classic platinum case. A closer look reveals, however, that the Roman numerals that are so much a part of the Cartier DNA are in fact in reverse order, and the movement itself is running in reverse. The manually wound 230MC caliber has effectively been inverted in the case, with the result being the appearance of a watch running backwards. 

The poetic sentiment to make time run in reverse is easy to spot here. It’s Cartier at its most whimsical for sure. But it’s worth pointing out that Cartier watches frequently play with how we view time, and force the wearer of a given watch to approach time in different ways. Think of the Cloche, for example, with it’s dial effectively turned 90 degrees. Or one of the jewelry pieces we were shown this week, a bracelet watch with a dial that is reflected into a mirror on the other side of the cuff, from which time is read. 

It’s these jewelry pieces, frankly, that impress me the most, as they combine so many different disciplines and artisanal crafts into a single timepiece. While they are decidedly outside my personal wheelhouse in terms of what I’d choose to collect or even what we tend to cover on this website, seeing them presented each year is a great reminder of the huge breadth of watchmaking, and that a “watch” can be just about anything you imagine. It can be a vessel for an indescribable ornate crocodile that circles your enamel dial, and it can be a unique piece completely covered in diamonds with a sculpted rendition of Cartier’s panthere chomping down on the buckle. This isn’t all Watches & Wonders is about, of course, but it’s a quintessential part of the show. Cartier