Advertising

31.1.13

Les Heures Fabuleuses de Cartier




Les Heures Fabuleuses de Cartier

Two of a kind
A veritable collection of jewellery timepieces featuring 41 pieces, including 23 unique
editions, the Heures Fabuleuses de Cartier make light of reality; enchanted tales to be told as time is transformed, the stage for a spirited bestiary whose secrets and tricks conjure a time that is more than it seems.

A collection that proclaims, like a Surrealist manifesto: “This is not a watch”.

Yet time is their destiny, diverted along the way, for the fun of it, the love of intrigue. A very feminine seduction from the most extravagant jewels, amazingly precious, inscribed in the Cartier tradition of ingenious watchmaking yet poised for transformation, the guarantee of supreme elegance.

These watches are uniquely two of a kind – a jewellery performance when a diamond snake slips off the face to glide over a lapel as a brooch. And what hides behind this tortoise-shell studded with diamond scales? Illusion, now you see it, now you don’t – Cartier is a watchmaking wizard with the gift of conjuring up extraordinary pieces.

The most precious watches, jewels of excellence and savoir-faire: the expertise of the watchmaker, who makes a diamond phoenix oscillate in time with the movement, and the skill of the jeweller, who transforms a chain into a delicate brooch.


Time is elusive
Playing on an apparition, miracles of jewellery, Cartier pictures a metamorphosis of time, watches that can play any role, now a brooch, now a pendant, now a watch – or all three at a time. Tripling their functions for a fantastically playful bestiary, a snake, a frog, na elephant, the elusive heroes of a watchmaking fable where time is the jewel in the crown.

This is not a watch, it is a volatile peacock, whose flight releases it from its mother-of-pearl marquetry face. A bejewelled brooch set with brilliant-cut diamonds on a ruby flower framed by nephrite jade leaves. Sometimes it alights on the face, clipping itself on to form a figure in the round whose volumes carve out time. Sometimes it leaves the hours free to reveal their mother-of-pearl field, blooming with sculpted white gold, studded with red and green in a hail of dazzling brilliant-cut diamonds.



Les Indomptables de Cartier
- Peacock watch
- Numbered edition limited to 60 pieces

Case in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold set with brilliant-cut diamonds

Brooch in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold: peacock in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold set with brilliant-cut diamonds, with a flower in natural ruby crystal, leaf in engraved nephrite jade, and eye set with a sapphire

Dial in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold, mother-of-pearl marquetry, flowers in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold sculpted and enamelled in relief, a shower of adornments in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold set with brilliant-cut diamonds

Sword-shaped hands in rhodium-plated steel

Strap in white brushed calfskin

Double adjustable folding buckle in 18-carat rhodium-plated white gold set with brilliant-cut diamonds

Quartz movement



Time is unpredictable
The secret is in the art, the art is in the secret, beautiful both inside and out, the surprise hidden within. Time concealed by the splendour of a morganite, a bird’s plumage, a nest of diamonds, poetic variations around a now unpredictable time, around which Cartier cultivates all the mystery. The hours appear or disappear on a whim or a fancy, precious hours whose jewelled refinements vie with creative imagination.
Time to see, time to hide, a tortoise plays with the hours that it guards. A sentinel on which a morganite is set, a gemstone shell that can open to reveal an oval silver watch dial. Is it a jewel? Is it a watch? Where is time hiding? It is true Cartier tradition to dream up watches that keep secrets, like this tortoise whose rounded shell, a veritable sculpture of diamonds, opens onto the surprise of dissimulated time.
And what if a ring could tell the time? Nothing here implies that it might: neither the ruffled diamond feathers, nor the mother-of-pearl beak, nor the emerald eyes of a perfectly harmonious parrot. The illusion seems faultless: how astonishing to discover a confidential watch face, imperceptibly hidden, mysteriously revealed as a total surprise.
Parrot watch and ring
Watch and ring in rhodium-plated white gold set with brilliant-cut diamonds, beak in mother-of-pearl, eyes set with emeralds Quartz movement.


No comments:

Post a Comment