WatchPro has been treated to an advanced preview of Cartier’s 2016 timepieces which will be officially unveiled at SIHH in January.
While Cartier wants to hold back two headline pieces for the Geneva show itself, WatchPro has gone hands-on with seven of the eight pieces to be shown.
As is to be expected from the famed jeweller there will be a large and varied offering of complicated new timepieces to cater for the house’s sizeable and diverse customer base.
Last year’s potentially blockbusting Cartier de Clé collection – Clé meaning key in French – gets the skeleton treatment in a 49,000 Euro white gold and palladium watch. The watch – with Cartier’s patented skeletonised Roman numeral plate – is far more exciting than that description might suggest and shows just how adaptable the design is, while its 22ct white gold rotor has been fully skeletonised, so as not to detract from those carefully planned voids.
This will, of course, inevitably lead to a steel model that will eventually become the last word in professional chic.
Elsewhere an intensely clever, jewelled creation, the Panthères & Colibri, sees a baby panther automaton jump from its mother’s paws and scare a hummingbird into indicating the watch’s power reserve through the arc of its flight. But the watch that really got WatchPro’s juices flowing was a positively off-trend, positively gargantuan complicated pink gold beast – the 47mm Rotonde de Cartier Earth and Moon. The watch indicates a second time zone, on-demand astronomical moonphase and tourbillon using skeletonised 3D Roman numeral hour marker frame and meteorite sub registers. The lust-worthy timekeeper is a sight to behold and just 15 pieces will be made, costing 210,000 Euros each.
