News At the beginning of April, Cartier made a night-time stopover at Paris's Le Bourget airport to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its legendary Santos watch. Chronicle of a gala evening.
From London, Madrid, Milan and Amsterdam, private jets from Europe's largest cities hired specially for the occasion touched down on the illuminated tarmac of Le Bourget on 7 April to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Santos watch, one of the first wristwatches produced by Louis Cartier for his extraordinary friend, the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont.
A luggage-free arrival for the personalities who emerged dressed in evening wear from their aircraft, after answering the invitation to spend an evening with Cartier from Bernard Fornas, CEO of Cartier International, accompanied in our photo by actor Jeremy Irons.
Phosphorescent beacons, airport markings, metal aircraft hangars... fiction or reality? Cartier cast a magical veil by transforming this transit area into an imaginary journey, during a dinner prepared for 600 privileged passengers by chef Reine Sammut, of l'Auberge La Fenière in Lourmarin, in the Luberon region of France.
The destination: an original voyage on a giant 360° screen, depicting the world of Cartier and the international metropolises that have marked its history. A journey of cities in images, from dusk to dawn but without jet lag, from Paris to New York, then to Tokyo, finally flying over the magnificent bay of Rio de Janeiro, prior to the appearance of the star of the evening, the Santos 100 watch by Cartier (see photo).
After taking on 1,000 additional passengers, this spellbinding flight came to an end under the gigantic wings of two Concordes, which, for the first and last time, marked the boundaries of a highly original dance floor that pulsated to the South American rhythms of the Trio Mocoto and the mixes of DJ Patrick Vidal.
Personalities in attendance included Jeremy Irons, Monica Bellucci, Miguel Bosé, Paulo Coehlo, Jean Reno, Benoît Magimel, Sophie Dahl, Alvaro de Marichalar, Sir Terence Conran, Lord Frederick Windsor, Marc Newson, Richard Berry, Bernard Giraudeau, Jacques Weber, Florian Zeller, Marine Delterme, José Garcia and Isabelle Doval, David Douillet, Laurent Blanc, Marcel Desailly, Abdel Benazzi, Christophe Dugarry, Yuri Djorkaeff et Stanislas Mehrar.
May 11, 2004
