Under His Stylish Watch

Cartier's image, style and heritage director Pierre Rainero gives us an insider view of the brand's latest key timepieces.

- LYNETTE KOH

One of the most talked-about timepieces at major Genevan watch fair Watches & Wonders in January, the Santos-Dumont Skeleton by Cartier features a microrotor in the shape of a lightweight plane. This accent is a tribute to Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator for whom Louis Cartier designed the first SantosDumont wristwatch.

It is a whimsical, meaningful, and refined addition to the timepiece’s skeletonised form. But the motif could have been binned had Cartier’s image, style and heritage director Pierre Rainero not listened to his intuition.

In an interview with The Peak at Watches & Wonders, the 65-year-old Frenchman, smartly dressed as always in a suit and dark-rimmed glasses, shared that he had doubts when the plane motif was first proposed by one of the designers in his team. “At the beginning, when we were discussing the design, I said, ‘Are you sure it should have this?’ I thought it might be a bit too obvious.”

His doubts were erased, however, when he saw how the design would be elegantly incorporated into the movement, such that the movement would be the first thing a viewer would notice, rather than the plane itself. Said Rainero, “Our brains can be too full — you have the intellectual part and the reptilian one, you know? The reptilian part is sensitive to emotions and sensations, and you have to trust your emotions.”