Luxury Cartier replica watches is an established superpower, and one that has been scaling new heights lately.
According to the same Morgan Stanley figures, last year Cartier squeezed out Omega to become the second-placed watch brand by sales, after Rolex.
In particular, that’s down to the current success and fashionability of its own square-form sports-luxe wonder, the best UK Santos de Cartier fake watches.
One of the famous designs that invigorated the steel bracelet watch genre in the 1970s, the Santos fell out of favour in the mid-2000s, a period when Cartier seemed at a loss as to how to marry its long history of shapely, elegant high quality replica Cartier watches with a strategy of becoming a technical powerhouse in watchmaking too.‘The modern Santos-Dumont feels like just the sort of thing to wear for a spot of Raj-era tiger hunting’
It righted the ship by putting the emphasis back on aesthetics, form and glamour, while betting the house on the Santos (and its smaller, female-facing equivalent, the Panthère) as the 1:1 cheap Cartier copy watches to hook in the aspirations of Gen Z – a project that’s proved wildly successful.
Nevertheless, I personally still struggle to be excited by the Santos, which I find a some- what cumbersome bracelet design, unlike its slimline, dress-watch equivalent, the Swiss made replica Cartier Santos-Dumont watches.
Both styles descend from what is claimed to be the original purpose-built wristwatch, made by Louis Cartier in 1904 for the early aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, and iterated into a commercially available model the subsequent decade.
The modern wholesale fake Cartier Santos-Dumont watches cleaves most closely to that Belle Époque blueprint, and can be found in either hand-wound or battery-powered formats, in steel, gold and two-tone.
But here again, a recent new and unexpected version stunned me: it’s a Santos-Dumont with a rose gold case partly coated in cream lacquer, which is replicated in a bamboo-like pattern on the dial.
It feels like just the sort of thing to wear for a spot of Raj-era tiger hunting; its mix of historic elegance and exotic decadence is potent.
A watch house at the height of its creativity
Meanwhile, keep your eye on the wild child of the AAA Cartier replica watches oeuvre, the Crash.
Invented by Cartier London in the 1960s (around the apocryphal notion of oval top fake Cartier watches, a Baignoire, that got melted in the wreckage of a car crash), its crumpled, absurdist case makes it one of the strangest wristwatch creations, even for a house as eternally inventive as Cartier.
But original vintage versions (of which there are very, very few) have recently risen to become auction unicorns: a year ago Sotheby’s sold a Crash for $885,000; in May this year, the auction website Loupe This set the record at $1.5 million.
Modern versions of the replica Cartier Crash watches for sale have tended to use it as a platform for some inelegant (in my opinion) skeletonisation work, but a breathtaking decorative version this year saw Cartier finally taking advantage of its sculptural form.
The 2022 super clone Cartier Crash Tigrée watches, with stripes of mottled green and blue enamel, and gold emblazoned with diamonds, is the work of a jewellery and watch house at the height of its artistic powers.