Cartier Asymmetrique

For centuries, watchmakers, in their quest to tame the rivers of time, built perfect, circular shapes: the O of the pocket watch, the 360 degree revolution of watch hands.

Then, in the heart of Paris, where a house named Cartier treated jewellery as architecture, a question was whispered: what if the watch did not simply tell time, but acknowledged the wrist on which it lived? What if it tilted its head, ever so slightly, to meet the gaze of its wearer?

The story goes that the Asymétrique, first launched in 1936 and known as the Losange (Lozenge), was born of wit. The designer had a thought: when you raise your wrist to read the time, you bend your arm. The watch face is naturally canted. So why not pre-empt this movement and build it into the very DNA of the timepiece?

This was not merely a rectangle on its corners but a deliberate distortion, a parallelogram with 12 in one corner and 6 in the other. To anyone else, it was just a diamond shaped object on the wrist, but to the wearer, the watch was in perfect alignment. The Losange didn’t just tell time; it formed an intimate connection with its owner.

Cartier’s obsession with shape was always  spiritual. The circle was the cosmos, infinite and divine. The square was the earth. But the asymmetrical watch? This was a form that embraced the beauty of the imperfect, the wabi-sabi of horology.

Platinum, the king of metals, was used: heavy, cool, silent and eternally resistant to corrosion. The guilloché dial was born from  the rose engine lathe under the guidance of a master’s hand. This is a dial with depth, with soul. It is not painted; it is woven from light and shadow.

To strap the Cartier CPCP Asymétrique to your wrist is to feel a connection to 1936. And when you raise your wrist, the world tilts, your eyes meet the dial, and the diamond becomes a square.