The Long Road

Cartier’s stylish new men’s only Drive watch collection has one foot on the throttle.

- Varun Godinho

Pitti Peacocks. That’s what they call the tribe of dandies who descend on Florence for the bi-annual menswear trade fair Pitti Uomo. Leaning against the door frame of the Hotel Savoy that opens up onto the buzzy Piazza della Repubblica, I have a direct view of this eccentric species. With lava orange and sun flower yellow suits, socks even brighter, oral shirts and feather-heavy hats, their street style game is as easy to spot as Melania Trump at a Democratic Rally. All this hyperbolic fashion is in stark contrast to the reason I’m here: the understatedly elegant Drive watch collection from Cartier.

If you’re wearing a watch, whatever the brand, you have Cartier to tip your hat to. That’s because it was the world’s first watchmaker to make a commercially available wristwatch, challenging others to follow suit. (Breguet and Girard- Perregaux made wristwatches many years prior, but those were either one-off royal commissions or produced as military-only gear.) The infection point was in 1904 when Louis Cartier designed a wristwatch for his Brazilian pilot friend, Alberto-Santos Dumont, who needed a way to tell the time without having to take his hands off the controls mid-air and dip into his pocket to pull out a pocket watch. The Santos-Dumont timepiece was revolutionary because it wasn’t a hatchet job of taking a pocket watch, soldering lugs into the case and fitting it with straps. This was instead a wristwatch designed ground-up, and by 1911 Cartier was selling these out of its Paris flagship.