Don't miss the next drop
Panthère is a square watch. The Cartier Cougar is the same argument made round.
Cartier launched the Panthère in 1983 as jewelry first and watch second: a square case with its screws left exposed on the bezel, a motif carried over from the Santos, hung on a five-link bracelet supple enough to move like cloth. The Cougar is that watch drawn as a circle, keeping the bracelet, the screw-set bezel and the Roman numeral dial. Cartier ran the family into the new century and discontinued it in 2004, so a Cougar sits in an odd and appealing place: too recent to call vintage, too long gone to buy new.
The dial is where the more interesting decision sits. By the late 1970s Cartier had grown well past its founding trio of Paris, London and New York, the watches were turning up on wrists everywhere, and the counterfeits had gotten good. The answer was not a hologram or a certificate. Cartier made the dials harder to draw, adding guilloché to some and finer printing to others, and on the Roman numeral dials it concealed a miniature Cartier inside one of the numerals. At arm’s length it is part of the numeral’s stroke. Under a loupe it is the word. By the 1990s the practice was standard across the big collections, Tank and Santos and Panthère among them.
This one hides it in the VII, one of the two numerals Cartier favored. Everything around it reads as it should for the reference: black Roman numerals on an eggshell dial, a railroad minute track, blued hands, the date at three, and no lume anywhere. The movement is Cartier’s caliber 87, quartz, and that was the point. The Panthère family was designed as jewelry that happened to tell the time, and quartz is what kept the case thin and the watch ready whenever its owner reached for it. The caseback says so plainly, engraved Cartier, Quartz, SWISS MADE, 987904 and 006101.
The case measures 33mm across and 39mm lug to lug on 16mm lugs, steel and round, with a polished bezel ring, a blue cabochon set into the crown and a flat sapphire crystal. It has been worn and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Light to moderate scratching runs across the case, the bezel and the caseback, the integrated five-link bracelet carries wear across many of its links, and the dial has taken a light speckle in places. It closes on a Cartier butterfly clasp and fits to about a seven and a half inch wrist. The 30 metre rating it left Switzerland with we read as a period marking rather than an invitation.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year warranty, on its integrated steel bracelet. Cartier hid its own name where almost nobody would think to look. It is still there, in the seven.
