It’s not as if square watches were ever out of fashion, but they’re having a moment right now.
This was confirmed in October with the launch of the first ‘brand new’ range that Patek Philippe has added to its core collection this millennium, in which the novelty turned out to be more philosophical than fundamental: the new line, named ‘Cubitus’, is, in fact, a square-form re-interpretation of the brand’s all-conquering sports-chic classic, the Nautilus.
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The Cubitus moment
That watch, as I’ve written here before, became the poster child for the kind of speculative excess that consumed the watch market during and after the pandemic – partly because its strange, ‘softened octagon’ design wears the notion of excess and luxury so seductively.
With the Cubitus, this enigmatic form-factor – porthole-inspired, with hinge-like ‘ears’ flanking the case, a horizontally grooved dial, and a sumptuous tapering bracelet – has morphed into something both straight-sided and more straight-laced (were you being unkind, you could say there’s a double meaning in its squareness).
Patek Philippe has kicked off the Cubitus with three models, in which the hot ticket is the entry-level steel automatic, a direct replacement for the equivalent Nautilus, the Ref 5711/1R, which Patek killed off in 2021 at the height of the market bubble. It even carries over the same olive green dial of the final, rather notorious version of the steel 5711.
There’s also a two-tone steel-and-gold version and, more elaborately, a platinum model on a composite strap instead of a bracelet, with a large double date window and day/moonphase indication. Further sizes and styles, including women’s models, will come in the future.
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None of this is revolutionary, but it does theoretically enable the design to turn a corner – well, four of them – away from the tumultuous hype and price volatility of the classic Nautilus, and live on in a more sober form for more circumspect times.
And by the way, I wish the official imagery did more justice to the reality on the wrist: whether you consider this a pedestrian watering-down of an untouchable design or an elegant way of moving the story along (and I’d say both views are allowable), the quality is not in doubt.
In the metal, the Cubitus watches glisten with the kind of high-gloss délicatesse you’d expect from the world’s pre-eminent luxury watchmaker.
Anyway, it’s hardly Patek Philippe’s first square watch – the archive contains plenty of elegant examples from across, the 20th century.
Square watches reborn
You could hunt out the marvellous Gondolo Cabriolet, a rare bird from the early 2000s, with a complex flip-top case based on a watch the firm made in the 1920s; delicate square dress watches from the Fifties and Sixties, including the wonky, modernist masterpieces devised by jewellery designer Gilbert Albert; and the lost Seventies classic that is the Ref 3587, which carried the battery-powered Beta 21 movement with which Swiss firms attempted (and failed) to compete with the quartz revolution coming from Japan.
Another watch to use the Beta 21 was a deliciously sculptural and fancy watch from Piaget, then at the heights of its disco-glam imperial phase, which paired a stone-cut
‘TV screen’ dial in a broad, rounded-square case with stepped embellishments.
Andy Warhol wore it, which was reason enough (besides the terrific design) for Piaget to bring it back a few years ago, now with one of its ultra-flat mechanical movements.
A new version, announced a few days after the Cubitus, sees this wonder reborn with the square case now decorated with a hobnail – known more elegantly as clou de Paris – guilloche engraving, something that was an artful feature of certain watches in the postwar decades.
That’s matched with a dial of blue meteorite, and a new name: as the result of a deal with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Piaget is now able to call this simply the ‘Andy Warhol Watch’. Cased in white gold, it’s also customisable.
The Seventies were quite the era for square watches – it was also when TAG Heuer’s Carrera appeared, a watch that Patek Philippe’s president Thierry Stern told me at the Cubitus’s Munich launch that he admired.
And as it happens there’s a new and very extravagant version of that too: a split-seconds chronograph (or rattrapante) version with an outré skeletonised dial (a rattrapante with two stopwatch second hands that can be stopped independently) being one of horology’s apex ‘grand complications. Yours for £121,000 – about 17 times the price of a normal Monaco.
Square watches were hot in the Seventies, but their origins go way further back – in fact, they predate the round wristwatch.
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The first (square) wristwatch
So far as we know, the first wristwatch (besides jewellery pieces) designed specifically for the wrist was a square.
Its invention, amid the bustling, picturesque milieu of the Parisian Belle Epoque, is the stuff of horological legend, and the kind of thing that really ought to be dramatised for the screen: it involved Alberto Santos-Dumont, an aviation pioneer and heir to a Brazilian coffee fortune, who in 1900s Paris could regularly be seen getting around town aboard a tiny airship, which he’d moor to lampposts as he dropped in (literally) to fashionable restaurants and clubs.
He also threw dinner parties for the Parisian beau monde, in which he’d evangelise on aviation by seating his guests at absurdly high tables and chairs (and once even tried suspending the furniture from his apartment’s ceiling, which came disastrously crashing down, along with his guests).
Among his friends was Louis Cartier, the creative mind at the helm of the fabled jewellery house.
In her wonderful book The Cartiers: the Untold Story, Louis’s descendant Francesca Cartier Brickell paints the scene in which, over dinner at Maxim’s, Santos-Dumont told Louis of his difficulty in checking his pocket watch – without taking his hands off the controls – during air races. So Louis designed the first wristwatch.
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With its distinctive square dial with elegant Roman numerals, a robust square with a riveted bezel and tapering lugs for a simple leather strap, it was an entirely new concept.
That was in 1904. By 1911, Louis was able to bring this radical design to a wider market, naming the model after the aviator who had inspired its creation. The Santos was a momentous fusion of pragmatism, style and modernity, and it still is. You can find it in a multitude of sizes, most commonly today in bracelet form where, since the Seventies (that decade again), it’s been absorbed seamlessly into the same sports-chic genre defined by the Nautilus.
Now that includes the first ever ‘dual time’ example, with a subsidiary 24-hour dial showing a second time zone.
But it’s the slimline, strap-bound ‘Santos-Dumont’ range that cleaves closest to the savvy elegance of the original, and which can also evoke something of the inventive eccentricity of Santos-Dumont himself.
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For instance, there are the skeletonised versions that feature a spinning microrotor (powering the movement) embedded within the display, weighted by a tiny sculpture of the aviator’s revolutionary ultralight aircraft, the Demoiselle. (Perhaps one day Cartier could produce an airship version too.)
Last spring something even quirkier appeared: the platinum-cased Santos-Dumont Rewind looks like any other Santos-Dumont, enhanced with a gorgeous wine-red lacquer dial.
But it hides a truly bonkers secret: it tells time backwards.
A close look reveals that those famous Roman numerals run anticlockwise around the dial, as do the hands themselves – Cartier modified the movement with extra gears to reverse their direction. It is entirely whimsical, of course, but then so is the idea of a ceiling-suspended dinner party.
As a limited-edition collector’s item, it’s rather fun and even slightly steampunk. But there are plenty of suave, beautifully realised editions of the Santos-Dumont for those who prefer their square-form timekeeping clockwise.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 94. Click here to subscribe
