Style Edit: Cartier’s classic Tortue gets a sparkling makeover, and the French brand turns playful with its Animal Jewellery watch collection
The esteemed Tortue gets the Cartier Privé treatment, while two new collections see the luxury watchmaker taking horological design to new creative realms
For each of the past eight years, Cartier has revisited its most coveted classic collections, embellishing them with the Cartier Privé touch and creating sparkling new limited editions. This year, it’s the turn of the Tortue – among the Parisian luxury watch and jewellery maison’s most venerable collections – to get the Privé treatment.
Making its debut in 1912, the Tortue quickly became a byword for the sort of elegant simplicity that characterises Cartier’s watches. It also began to sprout a selection of complications from its earliest days – including, in 1928, a Tortue model that would go on to become one of the most loved, a monopusher chronograph.
That model and its successors are honoured in two new stand-out Monopoussoir Chronograph pieces in the Cartier Privé Tortue collection. In particular, the dial takes its visual cues from the version released in 1998 as part of the Collection Privée Cartier Paris. It has the same blued hands with circular motifs and the same distorted triangle shapes at its corners, but its minute track has been moved to the outside, allowing the two chronograph subdials to dominate the centre.
The Monopoussoir Chronograph comes in two models, each available in a limited edition of 200: one in platinum with raised, rhodium plated numerals, and the other in yellow gold, with black, printed numerals. Both are powered by the Manufacture 1928 MC calibre, which at just 4.3mm thick is Cartier’s thinnest chronograph movement.
In addition to the new chronograph edition, the Cartier Privé Tortue collection also includes an hours and minutes version, which similarly comes in either platinum or yellow gold, with the same numerals, hands and outer minute track. Each comes in a limited edition of 200, while a third iteration, in platinum and set with brilliant cut diamonds, comes in an edition of just 50. At the heart of all three is the slimline manual winding calibre 430MC.
Cartier’s reputation as a jeweller is widely known, but the maison has also distinguished itself with two new collections of jewellery watches that playfully push horology into new realms of creativity.
