Back(wards) To The Future: The Method To The Madness Of The Cartier Santos Dumont Rewind

There is always a certain amount of controversy associated with the introduction of enormous numbers of new  watches at any trade show – it’s inevitable that with changes will come both agreement and disagreement from collectors, enthusiasts, and consumers in general. This year at Watches & Wonders 2024, Cartier did something that seemed to absolutely fly in the face of its dedication, especially over the last few years, to emphasizing its identity as a home for classic watch designs which hew to its well known innovations in case geometry, and which speak to its design language from the past. And indeed, this year, Cartier came through with new Tortue models, including a new Tortue Monopoussoir, in its Privé collection – both models instant hits and both likely to be extremely hard to acquire thanks to the limited production (200 pieces of each model in gold or platinum).

However, another new Cartier introduction had a lot of people scratching their heads and even, at first, writing it off as an inexplicable fit of madness from a maison whose patrician stability and attitude of rising above the ebb and flow of transient tastes is rivaled by few other brands (except maybe Rolex). That new release was the Cartier Santos Dumont Rewind, which has a movement set up so that the hands run backwards. As in, anticlockwise.

It would be a shocking idea from any brand to some extent, but it is especially shocking from Cartier; you look at the watch, which at first glance looks like a completely conventional and conventionally attractive Santos Dumont, and you see the backwards Roman numerals and the first thing you want to do is check the calendar to see if somehow it’s April 1st and you missed it. I have seen backwards running watches before but none that I can recall which were mechanical – the famous Backwards Goofy watch, a character watch made for Disney by (I think) Seiko subsidiary Lorus, is the best known example although there are others including backwards watches intended as satires on politicians from both ends of the political spectrum. But a backwards mechanical? From a luxury brand? From one of the most venerated of all watch and jewelry maisons, whose stock in trade is white glove, carriage trade luxury? What the actual heck?

So here’s what I think is going on, after thinking about this for a few days post-general release. I think of this watch as somewhat akin to the Cartier Crash, and I’ll explain why. The most basic contract between a watch and its owner is that a watch should tell the time and while there are watches which are certainly, by the very nature of their design category, going to be difficult to read – skeletonized watches are one notorious example – it is to say the least unusual to have anyone make a watch that seems willfully intended to trick you into making a mistake; it’s like rigging a steering wheel so that turning the wheel to the right makes the car turn to the left. Hands, any kind of hands, are supposed to go clockwise and every hard-wired instinct any fan of analog timekeeping has, is to read off the time as if the hands are rotating clockwise.

The Cartier Crash subverts the whole notion of geometric regularity, and especially of circular geometry, as the natural and even necessary reflection of the basic nature of time. The Santos Dumont Rewind does something similar, except instead of subverting the sense of time as a repeating cycle, it subverts the basic arrow of time itself. This is not something technically very difficult to do – if you want to make a mechanical watch run backwards, all it takes, I think, is one more wheel with a one to one gear ratio in the motion works, as discussed in a Reddit thread from 2020 (although since the motion works run off the center wheel, which is in the center of the movement, you probably have to rearrange other things as well; getting the seconds hand to run backwards would be even more problematic).

The Rewind is both an exercise in subverting a preconception – in the same way the Crash does – and an exercise in subverting the mental habit behind reading the time in a clockwise direction; it is a reminder that what we think of as part of the natural order and even a manifestation of the natural order, is actually a convention. The only thing missing I think is the missed opportunity to make the Roman numerals mirror images of themselves, for a real looking glass effect, but maybe Cartier knows that when it comes to undermining fundamental habits you have to walk before you run.

The Cartier Santos Dumont Rewind: case, 31.4mm x 7.3mm, platinum, with ruby cabochon; 30M water resistant. Dial, carnelian with inverted Roman numerals. Movement, caliber 230 MC (modified MC 430 based on Piaget caliber 430P) 20.5mm x 2.15mm, running in 18 jewels at 21,600 vph. 200 piece limited edition, price, $38,400. For more, visit Cartier.com.