Did you know that Cartier accepts custom orders for watches that allow you to design your own unique timepiece? According to a recent article in the New York Times, Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s Director of Image, Style and Heritage, stated that a custom order has to respect “our values in terms of design, so our sense of proportion, our sense of association of colors.” Not all custom orders are accepted, and the finished product can be pricey.
The article features a newly created custom order watch designed by Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches at Material Good, a luxury retailer with locations in New York, Miami and Dallas. Ben-Yehuda’s design “simply looks like an extra-large Cartier Santos-Dumont timepiece, with the house’s proprietary 430MC movement. The case is yellow gold with a malachite dial on a deep green alligator strap with a gold ardillon buckle.” The most striking design element however, is in the crown which contains
…numerals from alphabets including Arabic, Hebrew and Mandarin — there was even a runic five because, he said, the “lost language is sexy, interesting and visually appealing.” Mr. Ben-Yehuda wanted the range to represent what he described as the bond that a shared love of horology created among people of different cultures. With that in mind, he called the watch, unofficially, Timepeace, intentionally using the unconventional spelling… “Now, Timepeace feels like it’s embedded with a lot of meaning and the importance of finding common ground.”
Ben-Yehuda was born in Israel in 1981 and moved to the US at the age of 11. A former actor, he once portrayed a Mossad agent named Itai (credited as “Eti”) on hit TV show, The Americans. A Hebrew speaking friend of mine noted that the number 7 was represented by the 7th letter of the Hebrew alphabet (letters in Hebrew all have a numerical counterpart) and that letter is called zayin. In Hebrew street slang, zayin refers to a penis, and is used in all kinds of crass, creative and colorful ways. Is this design element a hearkening back to Ben-Yehuda’s youth, where he must have learned all the zayin related phrases with his schoolyard buddies? Or is it merely also “sexy, interesting and visually appealing?” We may never know!
Me? I’d like to think that Ben-Yehuda was inspired by one particular use of the term zayin – Ani sam zayin – which according to the TLV1 podcast, translates literally into “I am placing my zayin,” but actually means “I don’t give a damn.” Isn’t that what success means? Not having to care about societal pressures and having the freedom to do whatever one wants?
Only 25 of the watches were made by Cartier at $32,530 each. They were sold to a select group of Ben-Yehuda’s watch collector friends. These include “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, Knicks basketball player Julius Randle, and singer songwriter John Mayer. Cartier’s standard Santos-Dumont watches currently sell for between $6,250 – $16,800 on the Cartier Website. World peace is surely right around the corner!
