Designed in 1904 for Alberto Santos-Dumont, it answered a very practical problem: keeping time while operating l’Oiseau de proie, an early biplane made by the aviation pioneer. In that sense, we can say with some confidence that the category of tool watch is introduced with the launch of the first wristwatch, even if the expression ‘tool watch’ itself would only emerge much later.
Over the following century, much of Swiss watchmaking organized itself around function. Brands built identities through aviation, diving, racing or chronometric performance. Cartier behaved differently. It gradually detached the wristwatch from pure utility and treated it instead as an object of proportion, a means of self-expression through shape.
Take the Santos, for example.
The watch remains one of the strongest designs in modern watchmaking, but very few people are drawn to it because they need to read the time at 2,000 meters. The exposed screws, the square bezel, the balance of the case against the bracelet remain the defining elements. The function, however, survives mostly as context.
That distinction matters because it explains a larger trend in Cartier in recent years.
The latest iteration of the Santos collection features stone dials, precious-metal cases, and introduces matching metal bracelets across several references. Cartier has also updated the line with a new ultra-thin movement as part of the collection refresh. Prices increased across the range, showing the brand’s move to position the Santos higher within its watch lineup.
It is a strategy Cartier has applied elsewhere across its shaped watch designs, from the Tank and Tank Cintrée to the Cloche.
Cartier is, of course, aware of the success these models have found among collectors. The strongest auction results in recent years have tended to cluster around historically important and highly idiosyncratic Cartier designs: early Tank models, the Pebble, the Bamboo, the Crash. This suggests a growing appreciation for the brand’s more daringly shaped watches and the design ideas they embody.
The danger for Cartier is becoming too reliant on the strength of its existing designs. Yet its response has rarely been a straightforward reproduction. Instead, the Maison has sought to reinterpret the ideas behind them in a more contemporary register.
The Crash is perhaps the clearest example.
Born in London in 1967, the Cartier Crash emerged at the height of the city’s creative and cultural effervescence. Its distorted case, often associated with the surrealist spirit and the rebellious energy of London’s art scene in the late 1960s, broke radically with traditional watch design conventions. Produced in extremely small numbers, the original London Crash is believed to exist in fewer than a few dozen examples, making it one of Cartier’s rarest creations. A Paris version would follow in the early 1990s, introducing the design to a new generation of collectors, before the Maison later reinterpreted the icon through increasingly daring editions, including the first Crash Squelette in 2015.
There is very little left to prove with that watch. Its asymmetry is already culturally established; its position within modern collecting is secure. Most brands would respond to that kind of success with cosmetic variation: another dial, another metal, another limited edition.
Cartier has taken a more disciplined and interesting route.
The most recent execution, available only through the Cartier Privé Les Opus collection, focuses once again on transparency through skeletonization, thanks to a new skeleton movement featuring high craftsmanship and beautiful hand-hammered bridges.
This time Cartier goes further, and also repositions the crown from 3 o’clock to 4 o’clock, creating a subtle yet noticeable shift in the case’s balance. None of these changes are dramatic in isolation, and at first glance, they can seem almost insignificant. But that restraint is precisely what makes the new Squelette compelling.
The new Tank Normale and Tortue Monopoussoir from the same Privé collection follow a similar philosophy. Both introduce almost imperceptible changes to previously available models, including a new hand set for the Normale that increases legibility, and a new movement and color scheme for the Monopoussoir.
Few brands possess an archive as instantly recognizable or as commercially valuable as Cartier’s. Yet the strength of that legacy also presents a challenge: how do you continue to evolve without compromising the designs that made the Maison iconic in the first place?
Rather than pursuing radical reinvention, which Cartier has attempted in the past with the extremely bold ID Concept collection, it is now following a more measured and successful approach. Across its catalogue, the Maison introduces subtle refinements, updates movements where necessary, and gradually modernizes proportions and finishing, all while preserving the character of its most recognizable watches. What might appear effortless is in fact the result of careful restraint.
That balance between continuity and evolution says a great deal about where Cartier stands today.
The watches do not feel vintage, but they do not feel conventionally modern either. They exist somewhere in between.
And that, ultimately, goes back to the Santos.
From the very beginning, Cartier approached watchmaking differently, not as a sequence of eras to be discarded and replaced, but as a continuous design language to be refined over time. Today, the maison blurs the line between vintage and modern so effectively that the distinction becomes irrelevant.
A Santos, a Tank or a Crash can belong simultaneously to the past and the present.
