Cartier Tank Cintrée: Malaysia Price & Review

Leong Wong 17 October 2018

Cartier’s Tank Cintrée makes a comeback.

Cartier's Tank Cintrée in yellow gold

When Cartier celebrated the Tank’s centenary last year, it rolled out a sexy Tank Cintrée, taking everyone by surprise. After all, the Cintrée was a model that hasn’t been updated in a while—recent years have seen more masculine collections like the Drive de Cartier and Santos take centerstage. So this year, when Cartier decided to reintroduce one of its most beloved vintage timepieces, it did so with not one, but three new Cintrée models.

Introduced in 1919, the Tank Cintrée embodies timeless classicism in an elongated, curved (which is what ‘cintrée’ means in English) case. A slim width offers the watch a vintage vibe, alluding to its provenance from the Cartier Tank, a watch created during WWI, in the rectangular shape of the Renault tanks employed in the war.

This year, the new Tank Cintrée models come in platinum (above), pink gold and yellow gold, all of which lend the timepiece a different feel. The Tank Cintrée is powered by an in-house movement, the manual-winding Calibre 8971 MC, made especially for its unusual shape.

It hasn’t deviated much from the original Tank Cintrée from the 1900s, which is probably a good thing, since it was loved for its iconic rectangular shape in the first place. Like the first model (and many other Cartier timepieces), the Tank Cintrée features a cabochon on the crown—sapphire for the gold models and ruby for the platinum version. Instead of the original Breguet hands, the new Tank Cintrée uses sword-shaped hands, which have come to be a Cartier signature.

The Tank Cintrée in pink gold

We can’t decide if we like the yellow gold or platinum version better but one thing’s for sure—Cartier does vintage incredibly well.