One to watch

TIMEPIECE:The clocks go forward tonight – a fitting time to explore the work of Cartier watchmaker Carole Forestier-Kasapi, says DEIRDRE McQUILLAN

IN THE RAREFIED and very traditional male world of horology or fine watchmaking, it’s not often that a woman makes her presence felt. But 44-year-old Carole Forestier-Kasapi is an exception, a master watchmaker whose virtuoso creations have made her an industry superstar. Since arriving at Cartier five years ago, her innovative and complicated mechanisms have set collectors’ desires alight and wowed the universe of haute horologie.

“It’s an obsession”, she says when we meet in Geneva. “I’m always thinking and dreaming about watches. I love technical challenges and how to find solutions. It’s in my character.”

Forestier-Kasapi is from Paris, and is the daughter of a watchmaker. She remembers as a child taking apart an alarm clock in her father’s workshop. “I was born into horology. My father used to repair antiques, vintage clocks, and I always wanted to take things apart to understand how they worked, though I was never interested in reassembling them,” she explains. At school she recalls teenage friends putting up posters of Michael Jackson “while I spent my time reading about Breguet . He was a pioneer and a genius.”

She went to Switzerland to study at one of the most respected horology schools, in Chaux de Fonds in the Jura mountains, where she was the only woman. After six years of study, got her first job and designed her first professional timepiece. Recruited by Cartier in 1999, she rose quickly through the ranks and says her proudest achievement has been the astrotourbillon, an ingenious and technically daring reinterpretation of a very old complication that took five years to perfect. A complication is any feature of a timepiece beyond the display of hours, minutes and seconds.

“I wanted to create a magic tourbillon and I think everybody likes it whether they are technically minded or not because it is very spectacular,” she says with a smile. Instead of being fixed inside the movement, her little tourbillon rotates around the dial once a minute. Details like that fascinate collectors.

Watches are big business and such concentration on craftsmanship, heritage and innovation is powering the booming Swiss watch industry.

Explaining male fascination with mechanical timepieces, Francois Le Troquer of Cartier says: “It’s male jewellery. It’s about excellence. A watch is a statement about power; it’s a statement about identity. Men want more and more sophistication.”

The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, said to be the equivalent in the watch world to the Cannes Film Festival, is an invitation-only, four-day event where new designs, many costing breathtaking sums, are introduced by top watch houses. Another of Forestier-Kasapi’s masterpieces, demonstrating her bravura techniques, made its debut there. It’s a modern interpretation of a pocket watch. “I had to struggle against the opinion that it wouldn’t sell, but I really wanted to make it and after a while objectors just gave up,” she says with a chuckle. It’s not hard to get the impression that her outward jolliness masks a very determined and serious personality. Price tag? €650,000. Before tax. Ten have already been sold and there is a waiting list for more.

A woman’s watch called Promenade of a Panther, featuring a diamond-studded panther oscillating on the dial, also attracted admiration for both its impressive technique and its elegance, drawing from Cartier’s iconic big cat imagery.

“I think women are interested in complications,” says Forestier-Kasapi. “To make complications for them, you can’t just take existing ones and add diamonds. We have to make women dream. It must have some kind of magic. What makes men dream is technique.”

She says she gets her inspiration from the everyday and from sources other than horology. “I get an idea and I put it on paper. It could be from a conversation with my neighbour – one idea follows another.” As for being a woman in a male dominated field, she shrugs, well used to the question, replying that first and foremost she is a watchmaker with a watchmaker’s eye.

She is currently working on a collection for 2016 with her team in Switzerland, masterminding some 60 ongoing development projects. She says she loves the freedom she has to realise ideas, even though some may take years to complete.

Forestier-Kasapi is the mother of two children, aged six and nine. Her obsession with mechanical puzzles sometimes spills over into home life, to the bewilderment of her husband. Recently, while doing the hoovering, her attention became fixed on the vacuum cleaner’s retractable flex, so she took the machine apart, “to see how it worked”, she says with another mischievous smile.