How social media remade the luxury watch market

A Brazilian aviator and a French jeweler walk into a bar. The year: 1900. The place: Maxim’s, the Paris clubhouse for the Belle Époque intelligentsia to discuss matters such as, How much absinthe is too much absinthe? On this day, the question was more practical: How does a pilot tell time on his pocket watch without crashing his airship? Alberto Santos-Dumont was the son of a French-Brazilian coffee tycoon, and a dashing explorer and aeronaut. His pal, Louis Cartier—another nepo baby as the scion of the Cartier jewelry empire, and a brilliant designer in his own right—proposed a solution: What if a watch could be fastened to his ami’s arm, instead of kept in the pocket of his trousers? This is how the modern men’s wristwatch was born. Cartier debuted the delicate, square-faced Santos in 1911 and has been producing versions ever since. They range from svelte relics to a showy platinum-cased 90th anniversary edition with a salmon dial and indigo Breguet hands that fetched…