Carole Forestier-Kasapi

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Carole Forestier-Kasapi - TAG Heuer
1 minute read
Movements Director*

While it may sound like hyperbole, one can hardly disagree that Carole Forestier-Kasapi has mechanical watchmaking in her blood. Her parents were in the industry and had an atelier she spent her time in after school while growing up. In school, while her peers idolised pop stars, she studied Abraham-Louis Breguet. It was almost fate for her career to develop at the world-renowned Renaud & Papi movement Manufacture. She even served as a consultant for Ulysse Nardin in their development of the movement behind the Freak launched in 2001.

But it was at Cartier that Forestier-Kasapi chose to land and grow, rising through the ranks of the brand’s movement department to eventually become Head of Movement Creation in the early 2000s and helping launch Cartier into haute horlogerie. Before her, the brand made beautiful watches with movements taken from other manufacturers. Under Forestier-Kasapi’s guiding hand, Cartier began developing its movements in-house, providing mechanical substance to its elegant pieces. The first collection with in-house movements for Cartier was introduced in 2008, and in the following years over 30 in-house movements were developed, including the stunning Astrotourbillon in 2010.

Carole Forestier-Kasapi

More than once, Forestier-Kasapi was challenged to rethink traditional movements. “What interests me is this inexhaustible creative capacity to reinvent mechanisms year after year,” she says. “Having a good idea can eventually happen to anyone, but reissuing a mechanism over nearly 20 years requires a different skillset altogether.”

Cartier’s swift ascent into fine watchmaking movements is greatly thanks to Forestier-Kasapi, whose ingenuity and efforts in pushing the boundaries of the mechanical art were recognised when she was awarded the Best Watchmaker Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2012. Since then, as Cartier’s strategy shifted away from highly mechanical pieces, Forestier-Kasapi decided to move on after almost 20 years at the maison to be Movements Director for TAG Heuer under the youthful eye of Frédéric Arnault, appointed CEO in 2020.

*On the occasion of GMT Magazine and WorldTempus' 20th anniversary, we have embarked on the ambitious project of summarising the last 20 years in watchmaking in The Millennium Watch Book, a big, beautifully laid out coffee table book. This article is an extract. The Millennium Watch Book is available on www.the-watch-book.com, in French and English, with a 10% discount if you use the following code: WT2021.

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