4N has published a video introducing the MVT01 Sapphire Planet that will be presented at Baselworld in March. They haven’t provided any details, but it looks as if they have machined the case entirely out of sapphire to provide an even more intriguing view of this original timepiece. Richard Mille used sapphire in the same…
This watch by Frédérique Constant is a courageous piece. It is called the Manufacture Zodiac 24H Limited Edition and it runs in accordance with ancient Chinese philosophy. The “hour” hand rotates once around the dial in 24 hours, and the “minutes” hand takes two hours to make one circuit of the dial. The hands move…
We have just begun the year of the goat (19 February 2015-7 February 2016), and several watch brands have launched goat watches thinking specifically of the Chinese market. While I can understand this, to be honest these goat watches are so far removed from the brands’ habitual style that they may seem more of a marketing…
The Grande Seconde series of watches by Jaquet Droz is based on a pocket watch that brand founder Pierre Jaquet-Droz completed in 1784, with two intersecting dials, the larger subdial below for the seconds. It was a brilliant and quirky piece of design, and it is not clear why Pierre made the seconds dial so…
The 2015 Oscars ceremony gave a lot of fashion designers the chance to showcase their garments, and there were some watches as well. Presenter Naomi Watts wore a Giorgio Armani Privé gown, and she was wearing a jewellery bracelet that looked like a watch but was in fact simply the Wallis Simpson bracelet by Anna…
Why was astronomy such a marked trend at SIHH, the watch show held in Geneva in January? Difficult to say, but several of the stands at the event showed a powerful astronomical theme, and other brands had some models linked to astronomy amongst their new products. Panerai’s major inspiration has always been its marine heritage…
Breitling’s new Chronoliner celebrates the brand’s long association with flight and provides a truly practical aviation watch, with chronograph and GMT function. It has a hand for a second time zone, and the bidirectional bezel makes it possible to set yet another time zone. This model has some period features, such as the piston-type pushers, the…
A lot of fashion brand watches are simply brand extension operations, in which as many as possible of the brand’s characteristic features are compressed into the relatively small space of the watch dial and face as possible, behind which a quartz movement provides the easiest possible solution. I recently wrote about the new Versace watches…
This is a quartz watch, which was demonstrated enthusiastically by Hamilton CEO Sylvain Dolla at one of the brand’s customary pre-Baselworld presentations. It has some interesting features that only quartz can provide. It was designed in cooperation with aerobatic pilot Nicolas Ivanoff and has something of the classic pilot’s watch looks, black dial, large numerals, plus a…
The previous versions of the PanoMaticLunar and the PanoReserve were presented at Baselworld 2012, and the new features of the 2015 Baselworld models are basically dial colour and finish. Glashütte Original has its own dial manufactory in Pforzheim and so have complete control over dial design elements. The new models feature intense blue and black…
Both Jaeger-LeCoultre and Jaquet Droz have presented women’s watches using versions of orange aventurine or sunstone for the dial. Aventurine is a quartz mineral with inclusions that give it a glistening effect. Van Cleef & Arpels used the blue variety of aventurine in the Midnight Planétarium and the Lady Arpels Heures Filantes, in which the…
If there is a word that defines our 21st century age, it could be “ambiguity.” The age in which Conchita Wurst dresses and sings female but wears a beard. The same is true of watches. There was a time in which men’s watches were men’s watches, and women’s were much smaller and more decorative and…
This is an image from today’s Versace press release presenting two new watches that will be presented at the upcoming watch and jewellery show Baselworld. Do you notice anything strange? Here is a larger version of the chronograph image: And here is another view of the chronograph, from a pdf attached to the press release: In…
Transparency is one of the buzz words today, transparency in business, politics, health… and the same is true in watches, where skeleton watches are becoming more and more popular. The Aerowatch Renaissance Orange Tornado (shown on the left) is a development on the Renaissance series developed in 2009 (on the right, Renaissance Big Mechanical Skeleton),…
I have a sort of inborn distrust of watches with LED screens, and particularly one like this with not two but four pushers that hint at a great fat instruction book. But this is Omega, and it’s linked to an interesting project, flying around the world in a solar-powered aircraft. This watch, the Speedmaster Skywalker…
How can a watch measure speed? Up until now, the usual solution was a chronograph with a tachymeter scale around the bezel, which can display speed by timing a set distance, a mile or a kilometre. But finding a measured mile or kilometre isn’t easy (unless you’re on a motorway). Breva have presented Génie 03…
“You know, former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches…” she says, looking at his wrist where a watch is concealed under a French cuff. “Rolex?” James Bond replies, “Omega.” “Beautiful,” she says. This is a fragment of the dialogue between James Bond and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Particularly significant because it reflects…
Just the fact that it’s possible to write a top ten article about Cartier’s new watches presented at SIHH is remarkable. In actual fact, if you include all the variants, dial colours and so forth, the total would come to over a hundred. Admittedly a few of them are existing models that have simply been…
If SIHH is like the hors d’oeuvres, Baselworld, running from 19 to 26 March, is a bonanza gala dinner. The Geneva show presents the 16 brands in the Richemont group; Baselworld presents just about all the rest there is in watchmaking and jewellery, with the massive number of 1,500 brands. There is space for everyone,…
One of the things that is happening in the watch industry is that some manufacturers are beginning to make use of innovative technology to tell prospective customers about their products. At SIHH in January, Montblanc had a huge model of their tourbillon with cylindrical balance spring suspended over their display, very beautiful, but a fundamentally conventional…