The Rise & Success of Cartier Timepieces and the Man Behind It | In Conversation with Cartier

foreign greetings my name is Waco and I have the in order pleasure of inaugurating I think the first watch collector convention uh focused around Cartier and its extraordinary shapes with the presence of the CEO of the brand the incredible cereal mineral and three of my best friends actually so our montenari Amanda needs no introduction it's probably one of the greatest champions of cardio over all the different decades even though you're very young at heart hour of course uh Eric who who also has I think he's probably got one of the greatest Cartier Collections and it's going to share with us incredibly historic watch which is of his wrist as well and my friend and fellow gphg did you remember Ahmed Shari Ramen how are you doing hi thank you publication thank you thank you for having us and thank you for being here including us Cyril if you don't mind I'm just going to go around and ask the gentleman maybe one question what got you into cardio to begin with and how do you feel about car J today Eric coopley State Collision uh my first recollection of the brand was get a Cartier catalogs but I was a kid in the 1980s and you know I'm really in to design and I think that Cartier has like the strongest identity in terms of design um you know in watchmaking people tend to get too into like complications or you know in-house movements all this type of stuff but really the most important aspect for me is like design and I think um you know Cartier designs are timeless uh you know some are well over 100 years old right now and they still look essentially the same and I think having that lasting uh having that uh lasting um you know uh shape and silhouette of all these watches be the same as they were essentially 100 years ago is really on a testament to like the uh the long-term enduring qualities of these watches and how do you feel about cartoon today I mean again you know we just saw this great stuff come out this year uh over the last couple days contact normal you know I'm like sweating right now it's like okay I'm down I really really love it um you know I'm sure we'll talk about later uh super faithful but uh updated kind of uh interpretation of one of the classics you know fantastic well I mean sir how does that make you feel you've got two gentlemen here Booth well we've got three technical mice here we've got one on Eric's uh left bris and one on either wrists of aramatanari so how and and all of those watches look surprised and they all look you know incredibly relevant uh and then you've made this now and how does it make you feel so these watches which are all over 100 years old roughly and to see this shape we just you know was your plan to create this perennial like perenniality test create a connection to the new generation for these extraordinary shapes how do you how does it make you feel the seat belt ticket first it makes me feel humble because the the models you have are so kind of rare difficult to find probably you had to search for quite some time to get them and to make them kind of a part of you uh these were born where long before I was born even if no I'm not you know you can never say so young anymore but anyway this one was so so old and talk about timelessness and we situated away timelessness is not what age is well it's just doesn't age you just cannot date them I have in my office a desk and I ask people when do you think it was made and say to Southern it would look obviously in 1927. it's the same design it's so contemporary what we try to do with many models was trying to find the original shape that say can go through the test of time because it goes beyond time you cannot date them could be made now 100 years ago 50 years ago it would have the same powerful design and that's where we have I guess all of us have a kind of a sense of beauty that in some way when the proportional right they talk to everyone in the old Generation all genders all cultures in the same way and I think that's what we try to do but the one you have are testimonial it can be invented so long ago and be so so modern today amazing Shari let me ask you a question I mean you are in a collector of very complicated watchers from many other brands including the king of convocations as well but we have this discussion all the time sometimes in your journey you go through very complicated watches and somehow arrive at this point where you're like I just want something that's beautiful all right talk to me about the unique beauty of Cartier and how you feel that it's expressing it so well today so it's about the Aesthetics and that's one of the reasons why I collect uh because you know that basically fundamentally three reasons one is the watch tells the story or the watch is complication as someone will you know react to it and the third is about the beauty of the watch the Aesthetics of the world and that is very very important and the reason why um you can go about in a roundabout way and you sort of come back to Cartier for me the reason is because uh of the design and the Elegance that I can't hear watching Suits and the reason why I got into the Cartier watches to begin with was because of its strong relation to Our Deck of a discipline because I love our deco huge fan it'll always be and that's what sort of you know and when it comes to sort of shaped watches with straight lines you really can't beat the Galaxy design so that's that's what really got me into it and although I'm you know it's nowhere near what Arrow or Eric because I'm not really a vintage guy I never have been I've been my journey to Cartier started with cpcp because I just thought that you know they were making amazing and sort of re-editions of the old uh watches but you know again the inside the depth and the Beating Heart basically said give it and give a new lease a lot to these phenomenal legendary designs at the past and that's what but really what means uh looking at Cartier as a serious content of electing although there is no complication or anything related to it I'm sick well you know what I'm saying sir I want to bring this back to you and we're going to grow our a friend of all of ours the clouds here because I remember for many years he was he kept saying the cereal would you please bring back cpcp and then he said when he finally understood your strategy he said you know actually he did it better because he made the entire brand CPC view which means you made everything that you've launched iconic right and how important was that for you to understand that you know you need to really just re-empower these extraordinary shapes and then and take everything else that was peripheral and just put it to the side yeah well that's uh basically come to what you have said so what makes Cartier unique and they say Cartier was a watchmaker of shape and was obsessed by a design in in many way and we can be very broad already but have the sense of proportion of shapes and elegance in everything which is done can be very very simple and pure like or can be also very exuberant but in each case there should be the same kind of search for Aesthetics coming first which everything starts from the design and that came from quite some long time ago so you talk about the art deco there is something interesting in uh there was the exhibition of Cartier and Islamic Art in musical artist in Paris it was also in Dallas Museum of Art and will be also in Abu Dhabi and what this exhibition was about let's say in the beginning of 20th century there was a kind of a Fed Up feeling about the academic art the way to represent reality in others and then we both the artist designer architect try to look up something else than this convention which was hard to represent both figurative or even architectural motive and one interesting research was to look about architecture in Islamic period of uh architecture of the Palace of the fesk and everything repetitive motive in there and this started from jury first then came from to Furniture and Design and there was a look for instance of the great mosque in cordobao and you saw over the arch with this kind of a motif adjustable color and then this came to be architectural Motif that came part of a Dewey and some part of watches then came back to architecture so in some way the Chrysler Building in New York represents something that is indirectly linked to the great mosque in Korea map and so Louis Cartier was very much interested he bought many things some from Islamic art from the Mogul family where they're from a little boxes or so forth Motif tableware pottery and tried to get inspired by it and among him also the other juries try to do the same so everything that came to the girl on Style that was using the platinum and these repetitive motive came first century and watches and then the furniture and so forth so in some way Jury has been the first to have to look back at the past with fresh eyes and and finding the modernity is more that look at things with fresh eyes wherever it can come from so in Renaissance Gothic became old and Greg became new and at the 20th century the old Islamic art and architecture became new and makes something which is article which is a contemporary today because these kind of repetitive motive geometric and so forth could talk to all culture everywhere and for something simple then it can be something that can be infinite so that's a part that came for watches and for regattier and on The View as well to redefine something which was a beauty coming from very very old motifs that came to be very very new and that's why they look so modern now because in fact it comes some so old patterns of the past and whether from Sevilla to Cairo or to India all of these are cards of our common Global I think imagination and memory they are kind of the ultimate Classics because we all have down in mind when we think about right proportion so whether from Babylon to civilian then they have come to be part of us it's very interesting we never really related to the Islamic part of it absolutely that there was such a strong influence there it's very interesting to know that the other source of interest for friends to go to Asian art to Chinese and Japanese painting how to represent perspective in a different way for after the honeysal the convention and when you take the subjective part of the viewer and you represent what should be there whether it's true or not and people were fed up with that they say how can we present something different with a color Motif with different pattern and using the shades and so forth that's why also in the article the black and white and using the shade like a different view of perspective not from the viewer's point of view but from the objective self so this part was very interesting which also linked to obstruction and say we can represent feelings not only with figurative things which are conventional so this moment of 20th century has been really defining it also came to the country in part of a Marcel Deshawn saying you know let's stop looking at convention let's see the eyes of the artists what makes things yes the eyes of the watchmaker is what makes the watch the eyes of the jewelry what makes a jury not what we think of the convention what should be fantastic and now let me ask you a question sir you know I've had the the great opportunity to to visit your home in Bologna I've had an opportunity to see what is inside some of you all as miniature suitcases that contain a treasure Trove of cardiac binary I have to have a very strong breakfast before I do that because I've always been risk of fainting from foreign logical Treasures that I see within that for example I know you have two of the existing Pebble original Pebble watches from the fact by remarkable yeah really it's a kind of a treasure the Whiteboard or the gray diet I just overheard you saying that you um have ordered but one of the new technical models yeah the bracelet what is it about cartoon today that you think you start you know that that the brand is doing right they are back to the Rose they are still making nice watches with a good design with a great respect of the areas and with the top normal the great job because they it found their the right size of the case the pressure is well done and also I like the touch on the red ruby crown the dial unlike the Polish steel dial maybe at the light in the yellow one prefer more cream dial on the airplane is a it's called I like this is I'm sorry I'm just staring here double it's incredible okay on that you know kind of a Temptation yeah exactly also I added a new one yeah and the other one so I love the fact that you're buying over multiple generations of Cartier and in fact Cartier today as well so I also wanted to do a little moment where um I wanted everyone to share their passion for the brand also in terms of the watches that they've acquired over their life and um Eric had acquired a watch that I think is quite a legendary one in in Cartier lore Eric tell us about the Sheik that in the uh bought from um Sotheby's uh half a year ago maybe or something from the original yeah so the brand is great because it was the biker I'm once twice the yeah the story was that it was awarded to people who won back to back yes the car rallies and I think it only happened one time in that period um and they made the two or three of them yeah there was there was one kind of given as a prize um I didn't bring it with me because it'd be a little weird but the another very cool part of this watch is the original box that it comes in because it's stamped on there it says Paris to the car rally winner yes it's very very nice um but you know we watched vintage collector Aficionado people uh geek out about like many details about these things right uh the box is uh very like handmade it was really beautiful I mean the Box isn't incredible with this and then you know this is like a mythical watch there's photographs of it you know in various like Cartier books over the years uh Whispers of how many pieces what not and then what this came up it was really interesting because I know that the common Laura was that oh these all had quartz movements well surprise this one is actually a mechanical movement onto it and so um you know seeing them in the pictures you automatically think it's something very very small but uh it's actually like quite generously sized and um you know things that I really appreciate about this are um when you look at it you turn it upside down you look at the construction this is not like a industrially produced watch um you know everything about it from how the strap is mounted with the screws and then you know like um the way that some parts of the case are caught like this is really like a prototype yeah like a produce three Carlos yeah and that's another thing that Moss a lot of the imagery but you know there's a patina that has developed on the watch but it's actually like three color gold on the top you know it looked just yellow but it's three color of the old one obviously a very true so I mean this was a very satisfying purpose yes exactly yes and it was kind of funny um it was in an online sale from Paris um Sotheby's which I don't know why it was on an online sale and not a you know a proper sale but I was like sweating for abuse for two weeks and I woke up at like 3 A.M my time to like bid on it and uh yeah I got it I got it congratulations it only hurts when you wire the money or whatever then you forget about that that's what recall was but it's very sad and fine this was a very very satisfying purchase for me okay that's amazing congratulations let's see in your other wrist you have one of the original tiger woman well this is an original original this is called the uh Prince of Nepal the original one resides in the Cartier collection uh in a vault somewhere and this was one that a special customer requested I think in 1989 1990 to me in exact replica of the one in the in the collection wow probably at a tremendous cost and um again you know really interesting things are with the yeah the watch and the bracelet or made in the uh Paris Workshop right um all French Hallmarks and those are the crown is a little bit Yeah the crown is a little different there's certain like bespoke touches to the watch that you know uh industrialized watch doesn't necessarily have but you know tying that to the new one um I was really pleased when I saw this in certain touches like are very special and unique and I think um it required a lot of uh kind of careful research and detail and absolutely exactly that sort of thing I mean things I see right off the bat are the curved courses which is a really nice nod to the original designs with me and then you know we were just talking before the film started rolling about you know the bracelet has been updated to be a little thicker to be more durable but it's still maintains this like incredible suppleness that you don't find in like yeah industrially produced brace and so I'm late wonderful I mean it's just really incredible so I I want to move now to a section of the conversation where I would like to invite each of you to ask a question so Shari why don't we start with you sir one of the things that fascinates me about Cartier is always fascellaneously and in all honesty compared to book that Arab and Eric I know I I got into cartoon much later but one of the things that Drew me to Cartier was your archives so you had London Paris and New York yes for the longest time and they were they all operate independently of each other yes and the archive must be extraordinary an extraordinarily rich so my question to you was that in planning at any point in time to maybe have a permanent display I know you've done a couple of uh exhibitions like you mentioned in the Intensive for museums around the world I've actually been to one in the design museum in London and I think that's the Santos it was Santos there's a Samsung so and which are absolutely fascinated because you learn so much from these and it was curated by Norman Foster it was curated by Norman Foster accidentally and it was a fantastic Edition in that space and again you just learned so much about it do you have any plans of having a permanent space say for instance in Paris or in New York or in London where we can go and try to do the books it is it is uh and it's kept in Paris in London and New York and we have made a prominent space inside the red lape Boutique on the Upper Floor floor where we have the material it cannot be open to General Public for for conservation reasons I see meaning there's some part of the books are fragile someone could ever sketch this down to the books are in red Morocco leather yes and some when we have the sketches and so forth you just put the light then there's something that would kind of Fade Away other part of plasters which were made to have 3D prints of the jewelry because the women just won and at that time you could not do some 3D rendering so this plaster there is quite fragile and they are broken we could do some replica in a 3D printing it's quite difficult and there are other parts which are very initial photographs or prints on uh on lead and these are also are very sensitive to light so they are kept in the uh in special conditions where the humidity and so forth is control so if you guys want to come in with this archive it'll be a pleasure to see I saw the black and white photo with the with the number and the date of the manufacturing and also saw the bigger rather kept with the Mona Lisa so so if you come we can organize a private visit in there but we cannot open that to public permanently for these countries Mike so my question was that would you consider opening something to the public in the future would you have the I mean not it doesn't necessarily have to be the original archives but as you said maybe look at design meals like a disease yeah because you have so much material and I just feel that people of the world you know they you know if they were being reached by it yeah they would be enriched wide um what what we do is destroy the archives when there are the exhibition like the cartoon Islamic art for instance as part of them so to the drawings or ideas or things or even sometimes letters and conversations for instance between the brothers string together and when they're the theme it makes the uh the angle more interesting if you come to everything at some point difficult to find a source of Interest except you have those who have really like you kind of a very very strong interest in looking at things and where they come from and so forth so they don't talk by themselves what we have done in New York is to cancel what they call living Heritage and think some part aware an original brooch and when it came and what was the context at that time and the article period and how you can make all such a relay there was also in Tokyo a very interesting exhibition called the story of and it was curated by um and it was interested in by that how the evocation of those who asked ordered created the species for so for instance he would make some hologram of uh of uh videos of people of their portraits so you would have a necklace and then in a hologram coming Center floating in the air the person who was wearing it it was for instance the coronation of the Maharaja of patella and and then there was a necklace also coming in there I have a watch from the Mojo popular the functions yeah and so then this becomes very very evocative but so to give all derogative power usually it's important to make a sonography and a staging thing if we just put the archives or you can make some replica and submit kind of a dry so we had to make them alive so we have this project about living archives we call this living Heritage would have something interesting in Hong Kong as well with we come with exhibition in the Palace Museum which is second of Julian women and there were some very interesting things about people and features and such but that's uh that's the part which is a very interesting project using technology technology exactly there are also something you cannot go through through books through kind of an advanced X-ray and artificial intelligence to bring back all the photos and things even if the books are too old to be really open before being broken but you can just find out and show that also with the plaster you can then remake some replica in uh in 3D hologram on scene can really show that you know also make a mirror where you show yourself wearing that and it can be really beautiful Arrow may I invites you to ask a question to see that okay in the future Cartier will plan to launch outdoor Heritage Motors like the less people yes I will not tell you which one I'm curious to know it yes so when there are those who are Heritage and with a anniversary 50 years of the pebble or the tongue satellite would do them and for others also we revive some model of language and there are others in the pipe because you have requests from the dung basketball then uh and talk to and many that are kind of in our wish list coming that probably you guys would probably eat like I'm going to say Benoit just just just put it out there webinarji we have we have announced the oval Max in them we have the I'm going to propose something unconventional but if if he well I know you're very busy Cyril but if you're a design team for example would be interested to visit bologna and get numb to arrows I'm sure they would love it my daughter was going in takes a note everything has a normal restaurants wonderful Eric you to ask the last question similar to what Shari was saying you know about the history of the brand and whatnot you know we've seen a really meteoric rise in I guess collector's awareness of Cartier stuff not like it was ever anywhere but you know suddenly you have all these um you know uh stratospheric prices being achieved at auction for all these really wonderful uh pieces you know um I think a little bit of like Chinese Antiquities because people have been collecting Cartier watches since like the beginning of watch collecting you've been predating and uh you know the downside of that is that you know people have been making like fake watches or partially fake or whatever you know for quite some time and um you know in the past um I know uh Cartier had like a program for like issuing kind of like I don't know extracts from the archives or whatever for these type of boxes which I know was like discontinued um a bit ago but um you know my question is is this something that potentially you guys would be thinking about uh redoing in the future and you know speaking about the values of some of these pieces it's because I feel that um when somebody is buying an auction or whatever 500 000 or a million dollars or you know even less or more or whatnot like something like that I feel like always gives them like a sense of like confidence that they're buying something that they feel is like a you know correct yeah correct or whatever so um I would say for that we are conscious of that and we are of course uh doing when we uh of course acquire ourselves put back in condition and so forth or when uh some someone like a gallery or so forth Acquired and want them to be put back in condition of course we check the authenticity and so forth the problem we face with that some galleries were kind of a not very kind of a diligent about that and put us in difficult situation we had a case where something was acquired say to be authentic which was kind of authentic meaning I mean altered several times right and so uh someone acquired it and then brought back to after say well it doesn't work we have to repair it and say the we've been altered doesn't make it authentic anymore and of course the person was really upset but if we have then so many requests coming it's a bit difficult or do they also want to make it kind of available again in two weeks when they want to put them on sale and we don't have the capacity to do that but we know that for the collectors like here who are acquiring things they would like to have this this pump so we're thinking about having these uh service but not for everyone because because those are those who are trading things and they just want to say can you find something in your archives to at least might be authentic yeah but to say not only in the archives but what has been done with the history of that product through life you know jury can make it an alternate way you change style because you want to resell them or you can resize a remount or do something on the movement at some point four wheel collectors will not look authentic anymore and so on that we need to have the product and to try to find what happened or how it could be put back in good condition and this is a bit difficult in Cooper we don't have the capacity before guys like you as you would love to do that as a service say we intend to acquire that can you authenticate and because it's true that so many have been going to be look alike yeah who are partial fake yeah and that's the most difficult that I mean there's all sorts of like uh I I call them old wives tales we we don't know at that time but it's like you know certain things were made in different workshops or that some people they whenever they had like extra things or they made X you know like all sorts of weird stories because people just been collecting Cartier for so long yes and um you know I think that um sometimes like it would be I think you make a very good distinction um cereal between someone that's uh get trying to get something authenticated so we can sell it for profit as opposed to someone who's who wants something of theirs which they're keeping yes and they treasure to be authenticated such as Eric with that yes sir I hope this is he will invite you to I think this one is I think this one talked to us and we knew it was it was real yeah and in some cases I've been also some special customer orders that uh in time is very difficult to find whether and so we say a shape we never saw right recently so uh a watch coming from an American collector and say I never had seen such a shape and it was from from the great grandfather who had acquired on special edition made for his wife Lauren and so look in the archive and say it's authentic but uh we just don't even know how to prepare this one incredible and so these are kind of very interesting stories but uh then uh for people like you would love to do that Sarah I know you were very busy man I were like on behalf of all of us so thank you so much for your time no thank you for your uh passion for the brand you know I'm honored thank you foreign

Channel: Revolution Watch

Views: 18,500

Keywords: Revolution Magazine, Revolution Watch, Cartier, Auro Montanari, Shary Rahman, Eric Ku, Watch Collectors, Watch Collection, Cartier Community, Cartier Watches

Id: ZFCOeXo1MBQ

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023