To celebrate the opening of their first UK boutique, at 138 New Bond Street in London, IWC have introduced the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar London Edition, reference IW502805, limited to 38 pieces. The watch is available exclusively from the IWC London boutique, tel. +44 (0)203 618 3900. The watch is in stainless steel, and…
After the post about the cheapest mechanical watches for men, it was time to do the same for women. Here it is more difficult. The market research conducted by high-end brands shows that many women prefer a watch that is simple to use and carries on running even when they’ve put it in a drawer…
I think that there are lots of people who would be interested in buying a mechanical watch, but who would prefer to spend a few hundred euros, pounds or dollars, rather than the few thousand that are needed for an entry-level watch by most of the luxury watch brands. So in this article I’ll look…
Apart from gold, silver, steel, titanium, aluminium, mother-of-pearl and precious stones, some watch brands feature materials that on the face of it don’t seem to have much to do with watchmaking. Usually the strange materials are included to provide a new talking-point and a theme that can be used for marketing the watch. Often the…
2015 is an important anniversary year – 240 years from the foundation of the company in Paris, 1775 – and so there will be some important pieces shown at Baselworld in March 2015. They have given us a quick look at one watch, the Breguet Tradition Automatique Seconde Rétrograde 7097, which makes timekeeping a spectacular,…
Baselworld is still three months away (19-26 March 2015), but some brands are already presenting previews of what they will be showcasing at the world’s largest watch fair. Three years ago, with its Premier Feathers collection, Harry Winston introduced the art of plumasserie – marquetry using feathers – on the dials of its Premier Feather…
The Blue Hour Girard-Perregaux 1966 41mm is a stylish dress watch with an intense blue sunburst-finish dial and a blue alligator strap. The case is 41 mm in diameter and thin enough (10.01 mm) to slip discreetly under your shirt sleeve, making it perfect both for use with evening dress and with a smart casual…
Cadenas looks very different from most Van Cleef & Arpels creations, which are often very French and poetique in their inspiration. Cadenas is, on the other hand, a bracelet-watch that is tough and chunky. Like the Zip necklace, the design was probably inspired by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – King Edward VIII who…
This unusual piece by Richard Mille is called the RM 053 Pablo Mac Donough, and the name is that of an Argentinian polo player, a testimonial for the brand. Pablo Mac Donough recently won the Triple Crown tournament and wore the piece during the match. It is in fact a watch designed for use while…
The answer to this sort of “crimewatch” question is fairly obvious, at least to judge from the latest selection of reports on watch thefts around the world. On a Saturday afternoon in mid November 2014, thieves broke into a jewellery store in St Paul, Minnesota, and stole about $300,000 worth of Rolex watches, using hammers…
Why Swatch? It’s the watch that saved the Swiss watch industry. An idea by Nicolas G. Hayek that led to the first Swatch in 1983, almost 32 years ago, followed by hundreds of models that by 2006 had sold a total of 333 million watches. The Swatch enabled the survival and subsequent flourishing of brands…
The Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum is part of a new Montblanc family of watches, the Heritage Spirit collection. The watch shows the time at any one of the 24 time zones in the world, by means of an in-house time zone module added to the movement and driving a series of discs as well…
Not so in the H1 Sand Barth by HYT, the latest version of their hydo-horological movement. In this piece that evokes a tropical beach – lovely thought in the northern hemisphere at this chilly time of year – the case in transparent polyepoxyde contains a sprinkle of sand from the Anse du Gouverneur beach at…
The Rotonde de Cartier Reversed Tourbillon is one of the pieces that Cartier will present at SIHH 2015 in Geneva from 19 January 2015. Its principal feature is the deeply-cut guilloché work on the white gold dial, something that bears comparison with Richard Mille. The previous version of this watch, presented in 2012, had a…
Green is the colour of jade and amethyst and so it often appears on jewellery watches. But there are a few men’s watches made in this colour, and they immediately become very distinctive items purely because probably about 90% of all watches sold are predominantly silvery. So let’s take a look at these ten green…
In the vast range of watches, one of the things that you can choose is how many hands it has. From the serene simplicity of just a single hand to the complications with ten or more, here is a quick journey with a selection of watches in order of number of hands. This also reflects…
All watches are interesting as tiny marvels of engineering, but a few brands have something extra in their DNA that turns their company history into a story worthy of a Hollywood film. A. Lange & Söhne is one of those brands. Founded in 1845 in Glashütte, near Dresden in Germany, over the course of a…
Asteroids are about 4.6 billion years old, and so incorporating a piece of asteroid (or meteorite) into an object designed to measure time is an interesting contrast. They date back to the formation of the solar system, and only very rarely reach the earth, because most burn in the atmosphere during their descent. Though many…
A few watch brands are releasing news of the watches that they will be presenting at SIHH in January, and Piaget has set another record for thinness, this time with a hand-wound ultra-flat chronograph. The dial has the classic Piaget Altiplano minimalist look, with continuous seconds on a subdial at 6 o’clock, a 30-minute subdial…
Caars, washing machines, electric drills and so forth have to comply with certain rules and regulations before they are put onto the market. For watches, this is not the case. For some categories, such as diver’s and pilot’s watches, there are some standards, but a brand can decide whether to comply or not. The only…