The luxury fake Cartier Tank Basculante is admittedly not my favorite Tank, but I’m glad that it exists. Or rather, existed. The Basculante is basically perfect replica Cartier‘s answer to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso: The face can be pulled out and flipped. The reversing mechanism of the Basculante is even a little fancier than the Reverso’s, though it was developed by the same company that developed the Reverso’s – pull the Basculante’s face out and a couple of arms extend, allowing you to flip the dial around. Or, leave the face propped up on the arms, and bam – desk clock! I’d love to see Malaika’s Obus Savonette do that.
While the Basculante can trace its origins to the 1930s, best 1:1 replica Cartier re-introduced it in the ’90s in a number of varieties, both quartz and mechanical, and then again briefly more recently. Most often, you’ll see the reference 2390 – a stainless steel Basculante powered by the manual-wind caliber 060 MC (an F. Piguet base caliber). On most examples, the dial side flips over to reveal a simple stainless steel caseback. But on some of these Basculantes – thought to be sold through the Paris boutique – the caseback has a small cutout to reveal the movement, embossed with repeating AAA quality fake Cartier Cs.
Enthusiasts have taken to these Basculantes in recent years. Perhaps the functionality just gives the anxiety-ridden among us something to fidget with, but I think the attraction’s a little deeper. In most cases, high quality replica Cartier‘s designs are simply design for its own sake. The Basculante is a rare instance where the design actually lends itself to something useful, in theory at least. If Swiss movement copy Cartier brought it back today, that’d continue to set the Basculante apart from the rest of its catalog.