In 2019, Cartier decided to bring back a classic from their catalog
of the incredible inventive mind of the mastermind, Louis Cartier. Stay tuned.
We've got the Baignoire in the large size with diamonds. Beautiful watches. Coming up.
If you look back on the history of the house of Cartier, you really don't go far before you
find the name, Louie Cartier. He was an absolute of the watch and jewelry world,
and a lot of the shapes that we've come to just sort of know and expect, and
accept as normal he invented. Really everything except for the round Louis Cartier came up with.
So it's no surprise that he was the inventor of the oval-shaped, ellipse-shaped watch.
And depending on whose version you're reading, this happened around 1908 or 1912, or 1906.
But suffice it to say that he took an already round watch and elongated it and curved the top
and bottom. He kept the sides straight and just curved the top and bottom in that original model.
But it was presented to one of his top clients at the time.
If you look at Cartier's history, really interesting how they had managed the three
brothers to sort of permeate the Royal houses all across Europe and even into
Asia. And they really just had such a far-reaching influence on the jewelry world.
But one of their top clients was the Russian Grand Duchess Pavlovna. And they presented this first
Baignoire watch to her. It wasn't called that yet. It didn't have a name. And when she looked at it
with the straight sides and the curved top and bottom, apparently she exclaimed that it looked
like her bathtub. And so the word Baignoire is French for bathtub and the name stuck. But they
really didn't make many of this watch for a long time. It wasn't until the design house
in 1957 or 58, again, depending on whose version you're reading really decided to revamp the
Baignoire and came up with the more oval shape that we see today rather than the straight sides.
And it wasn't made in big numbers in the fifties, but it became just a cult icon amongst, especially
a lot of the really sophisticated fashion-forward people that were in England and France at the
time. So it became kind of this icon in itself for iconic people to wear. It really sat out there as
sort of a collector's item for a long time. And then in the 1990s, Cartier really pushed forward
and came out with a lot of different versions of the Baignoire. So this is when you saw the mini,
the small, the plain ones, diamond ones, gold bracelet ones with the custom-built
bracelet. You saw colored stones set on them in the Tutti Frutti collection. But this one
really to me sort of takes the cake because it is incorporated all of the modern advancements
in watchmaking but in this sort of throwback design that really looks back a hundred years.
It is a large-scale watch. It is about 44 millimeters high
and about 34 wide. So it's a large-scale ladies' watch, and it is completely curved with the wrist.
It's so cool. It's about 10 millimeters thick, but you really wouldn't know it when it's on the wrist
because of the way the entire case, crystal, dial, everything is curved. And it just sits so nicely
on the wrist. Of course, the star of the show on these watches is the Cartier stone-setting
ability. They are a jeweler first and a watchmaker second. They are one of the premier
jewelry houses in the world. And their pave setting is so much better than anyone else's I've
ever seen. It really looks different. You can tell that they use only top-quality diamonds. They use
full-cut, 58 facet diamonds, and in each space, they use the biggest diamond that will fit.
So you don't see really any metal just diamonds. When you look at these watches.
In a rare move, Cartier has published some stats on the diamonds in these. It is 149 diamonds
that total 1.44 carats. Although that seems to be the case with diamonds,
not the one that's on the crown as well. You know, if you've been looking at these very long,
Cartier normally has a blue stone on the crown, but on the diamond watches,
they'll put a diamond on the crown and it's just such a nice touch for the attention to
detail that they give to their pieces. The dial is a flinque guilloche with printed Roman numerals,
of course, the secret Cartier signature in the thin line of the 7. You can see this if you
zoom in on the pictures on our website, you'll see that the thin line is not really a line.
It's a micro printing of the word Cartier. It's not the one tell-all end all be all,
but I've never seen a fake watch get that micro printing, right. So it's definitely
one of the signs of authenticity, if you see that micro printing done well, and it's really crisp,
and the letters are correctly aligned and the font is correct, it's difficult to reproduce that.
But when you look at the case itself, it has such a great design. The way the
underside is polished. We have the Cartier deployant buckle, which Cartier invented
way back in 1908. This one's adjustable, of course, so you can make the strap fit just about
any wrist size. And I'll show you the back of the white gold one we have here because it doesn't
have the service center sticker over the movement, but you can see it's got the exhibition caseback
and the plates and the movement are heavily decorated with the Cartier double C logo.
You can tell, this is one of their in-house manufacturer caliber movements because of the
blued Cartier C that's connected to the balance wheel, but this is
caliber 430 MC the MC stands for manufacture caliber. Everything's done in-house. It's
certainly I'm sure they've borrowed some of the expertise of some of their Richemont stablemates
from Jaeger-Lecoultre to Vacheron Constantin. But it's a fabulous movement, all handmade,
and it's not common to see that kind of a handmade hand-wound mechanical movement in
a lady's watch with an exhibition caseback. So if you're a watch aficionado, you love
the mystery and romance of the tiny little machine that runs 24 hours a day with an
incredible degree of precision right there on the wrist. Being able to take a certain amount of
temperature changes, shocks, position changes, and still run at a real high degree of accuracy,
this could be the perfect jewelry watch for you. And the straps that are on these Cartier
normally have a swatch of about 150 colors to choose from. You can get any kind of strap you
want, and you could really have fun with some wild colors, or you can make it look really
dressy with something that's more traditional, like patent leather, or a black alligator,
something like that. But don't let the strap color the watch too much for you in your mind, because
sort of like a room where you might see the color that it's painted and think that's locked-in. It's
not you can change that anytime you want yourself though. Give us a call here at SwissWatchExpo.
See if we've still got these two beauties in stock. They'll be a great mother's day gift,
and we can definitely ship overnight. So give us a call and we'll get 'em right out
to you. Give us a call, click the button to like and subscribe and give us a ring.