Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 7 of B.H. Magazine, order your copy now.
Despite the enormous number of Cartier Tank watches in existence today, most people are shocked to learn that before 1965, only around 2,200 examples had ever been produced.
It's a remarkable fact given the Tank’s fame – proudly worn by everyone from Muhammad Ali to Andy Warhol – but much of that fame was built over the last half-century, when Cartier began producing it in volumes never seen before.
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The Tank's international ubiquity began in 1977 with the debut of Les Must de Cartier, a new line conceived by Robert Hocq and Alain-Dominique Perrin. The pair had taken control of a then-struggling Cartier and landed on a strategy that preserved the design codes we know, while lowering the entry point into the brand.
With accessibility as the central aim, the Tank Must replaced solid gold cases with gold-plated sterling-silver vermeil and kept costs down with simple mechanical movements or the then-newfangled technology of quartz.
From there, Cartier did what it does best and took the Tank Must to market with beautifully conceived campaigns. The result was an enormous commercial success, producing dozens of variations, from wood-cased models and colourfully lacquered dials to Trinity editions with yellow, rose, and white gold across their faces.
Of all Tank Must variations, the Concorde is the most alluring. There's obvious nostalgia in the association with supersonic flight, but there's also an unlikely contrast at play: the most democratised Cartier watch ever made, sold in one of the least democratic environments imaginable.
Everything about Concorde was pitched above the everyday. The aircraft cruised at roughly Mach 2, dramatically cutting transatlantic flight times, and quickly became a symbol of corporate power, celebrity, and a form of late-20th-century optimism that now feels almost fictional.
Souvenir shopping at 60,000 feet and twice the speed of sound was absurd, but in the best possible way. Surviving brochures show the onboard retail mix extended well beyond standard duty-free, with British Airways Concorde catalogues featuring Hermès silk scarves, pure pashmina shawls, and Baccarat perfume.
Air France offered an equally opulent selection: Boucheron jewellery, Montblanc fountain pens, and Must de Cartier watches.
In that context, a Tank Must sold somewhere over the Atlantic makes perfect sense.
It was luxury retail aimed at a captive audience already paying for one of the world's most exclusive tickets – a watch engineered to broaden the brand's reach, placed in an environment where glamour, speed, and French Champagne (Perrier-Jouët Blason de France, according to one surviving menu) were already doing the sales work.
The watch itself is not the rarest Cartier ever made, nor the most mechanically significant. What makes it compelling is the intersection it represents: one of the foundational designs of 20th-century watchmaking in its most accessible form, sold aboard a jet-age fantasy that turned travel into pure theatre.
It captured a brief, specific moment when luxury felt unapologetically itself – when buying a watch in the sky was considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And honestly, it was.