Cartier’s Beloved Tortue Watch Is Back in a Big Way for 2024
Welcome to a special Watches and Wonders edition of Dialed In, Esquire’s column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world. As the show takes place in Geneva, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the biggest makers’ biggest releases of 2024.
As a proponent of leading with impeccable taste and design in its watchmaking since the year dot, Cartier has a back catalog of iconic and celebrated shapes to which it returns regularly. Some are more celebrated than others, however. The Tortue, which gets its name for its distinctive tortoise-like shape is, perhaps surprisingly, even older than the celebrated Tank. First created in 1912, it came along just seven years after the house created the first purpose-built wristwatch for pioneering aviator Alberto Santos Dumont in 1905. Basically a circle with a squared-off top and bottom, it’s a shining example of how Cartier was already exploring new shapes that prefigured the critical role it would have a decade later in the explosion of art deco. And now it’s one of the prime areas of focus for 2024’s range of new pieces.
Introduced for 2024 as part of its Privé collection—a segment of the maison’s output dedicated to its collector’s editions, now in its eighth iteration—the Tortue comes in two arresting executions. The first to leap out are two monopusher chronographs in platinum or yellow gold, based on a chronograph style first introduced in 1928. Both are driven by a movement just 4.3mm thick (the thinnest chronograph in the Cartier armory) and activated by the cabochon-topped crown. For those who like their Cartiers a little more discreet, the same Tortue shape is executed in platinum and yellow gold version with two-hand “hours and minutes” versions. Both the chronograph and “hours and minutes” versions come in limited editions of 200 pieces.
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