Almost everyone has heard of Cartier, the French luxury goods conglomerate that designs, manufactures, distributes and sells jewellery, watches, and pens, including ballpoints.
I decided to look around for a Cartier ballpoint on various auction houses, and I found one.
It was a signed and numbered, gold-plated Must de Cartier, with its original presentation box. The price was competitive, even if I would have to pay shipping. “Competitive” is always relative, but Cartier offers today new pens from 385€ to 14,100€.
Must de Cartier
“Must de Cartier” was essentially a Cartier sub-brand, introduced in the 1970s to offer recognisably Cartier-designed objects at prices below Cartier’s traditional precious-metal jewellery and watches. It allowed Cartier to sell objects using less expensive materials but very strong Cartier styling.
The famous example is the Must de Cartier Tank, introduced in 1977. Instead of a solid-gold case, many were made from silver with gold plating (vermeil). The range also included pens, lighters, leather goods, perfumes, eyewear and accessories.
Cartier subsequently moved away from putting Must de Cartier across its writing-instrument range.
An exact description
I must say that the auction house was not particularly precise, but not misleading. The ballpoint is a Must de Cartier, but “Les Must de Cartier — Vendôme Oval Trinity ballpoint pen, flattened oval gold-plated body with longitudinal Godron decoration, three-colour Trinity rings, probably 1980s“, would have been more complete.
I think that Cartier was still producing Must de Cartier gold-plated accessories with these finishes in the 1970s–80s, but I haven’t yet found a Cartier catalogue that lets me date the serial number to a specific year.
Unlike many of the modern Cartier ballpoints, this one was deliberately designed like a substantial luxury writing instrument rather than like an ordinary retractable ballpoint. And when capped, the ballpoint nature of it is not immediately obvious.
Incidentally, Cartier itself uses the word “gadrooned” for the fine longitudinal decoration on current pens.
Finding refills
The only real problem is finding refills. My understanding is that Cartier no longer makes them, but there are third-parties who do. So I will start to test them.
You can see above that for this model the nose does unscrew, but it’s through a small cap on the base that the refill is inserted.
