Cartier’s new watches offer a heroic reframing of the passage of time

Photography by Lydia Whitmore

When the aviator and inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his airship around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, he became one of the most famous people in the world. Santos-Dumont embodied the spirit of fin-de-siècle France, synonymous with the popular heroes of Jules Verne; he blended style with mind-bending achievement, pushing the limits of the possible.

Cartier has long honoured Santos-Dumont with a series of watches named after him; this year their newest models riff on this limitless sense of human endeavour by playing with the very order of time itself. The Santos de Cartier Dual Time has two dials by which different time zones can be tracked, and, even more radically, the Santos-Dumont Rewind flows backwards through time running in reverse, counter-clockwise, reordering the passage of time around the wearer themselves.  Thomas Roueché