Both modernist and historical

If you are really familiar with centuries of historical background of the outstanding Maisons in haute horlogerie, and you believe that only specific watches can impress you, your next first stop must be Santos because Cartier Santos, designed by Louis Cartier at the beginning of 1900s for the pilot Albert-Santos Dumont, and then launched in 1911, was in fact the first men’s wrist watch. Santos’ case design was inspired by the square pocket watches. On the other hand, the reference points of the modifications in the design were referring to the modern world: the screws on the bezel were inspired by the pillars of the Eiffel Tower, while the Roman numerals on the dial resembled the radial symmetry of the city plan of Paris. When a new category called “sport-luxury” was discovered with the “new sportive” perspective that reappeared in the 70s in the haute horlogerie, Cartier considered it as an opportunity to revisit Santos, and made some interesting and significant modifications. Firstly, the brand started to use stainless steel for the first time, and with a “dualist” approached, revealed, again for the first time, the famous yellow gold-steel duo-case of the watch. We can say that both steps played significant roles in the introduction of the contemporary Cartier watches, which we are familiar today. With the introduction of 13 new Santos models, including quartz movements, by the brand in 2018, this historical model embraced a wider family in addition to being the favorite model of young watch fans. The Santos-Dumont model, introduced a couple of weeks ago, is one of the most masculine watches of this family. As it can be understood with the XL abbreviation in its name, the case of this model has a larger size (46.6mm x 33.9mm), and despite its ultra-thin movement (430 MC), developed by Cartier based on the calibers used in its thin models, it is manually wound! Which means that you have to re-wind your timepiece every 38 hours. Offered with 3 case alternatives, consisting of rose gold and steel combination, rose gold, and stainless steel versions, our choice is definitely rose gold version of Santos-Dumont XL.