Over the past decade, while earning its chops as a serious technical watchmaker, Cartier has demonstrated time and again its mastery of the artistic crafts – métiers d’art in the Francophone world of watchmaking. It has taken traditional techniques and gone further – for example, using straw and flower petals for marquetry. It has also remastered 3000-year-old techniques that were virtually extinct, including granulation – a manner of creating surface texture using tiny gold beads. As a result, we have seen a series of achingly beautiful dials – exquisitely detailed, a celebration of human skill. Beautiful they are, but quite serious. Cartier is not one to fool around. So, who could have guessed that the most fun watch of SIHH 2018 would have come from the grand Parisian Maison? Looking at the photographs of the watch outside Cartier’s booth, I could only think, “Huh? What’s going on here?” A watch with a panther’s face on the dial – so far, so Cartier. Pictures of a slightly pixelated or deconstructed panther’s face? Strange. You need to see the watch in reality (or at least a video) to make sense of it. It’s confounding. It’s delightful. It’s like watching a magic trick.…
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