“Mare Nostrum,” our sea, was the name used proudly by the Ancient Romans for the Mediterranean Sea, and later by Mussolini’s regime. This watch, presented at SIHH in January 2015, is based on a timepiece made for Mussolini’s Royal Italian Navy in 1943, a chronograph for deck officers in turn derived from an earlier 1924…
Company profile: Panerai, or Officine Panerai, is a brand whose success is based on making relatively small numbers of watches that all look fairly similar, because they are based on the company’s historical precedents. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Panerai supplied the Italian Navy with timepieces for its commando divers, and the watches that they…
Company profile: Self-taught watchmaker Antoine LeCoultre set up his first workshop in 1833, and to this day the Jaeger-LeCoultre Manufacture has been at the same location in Le Sentier, Vaud. About thirty years later, a time at which Swiss watchmaking was based primarily on outsourcing with individuals making movements in small home-run workshops. Antoine and…
Company profile: Ateliers Louis Moinet is an independent watchmaking company that was founded in Saint-Blaise, Neuchâtel, in 2004. The name comes from artist, writer and watchmaker Louis Moinet (1768-1853), who was born in Bourges, France, and worked in Paris, a friend of Abraham-Louis Breguet. Moinet’s clocks include timepieces with automations, and an 1816 pocket watch…
Louis Moinet is at its tenth anniversary, while also celebrating the 200th anniversary of a remarkable chronograph invented by Louis Moinet in 1815. The historical piece was an incredible watch far ahead of its time, running at a frequency of 216,000 vibrations per hour (most watches today run at 28,800 vph) and capable of measuring 1/60…
Company profile: Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey have been working together from about 1992, and they launched launched Greubel Forsey in 2004. Previously they had worked at Renaud & Papi, developing watch movements. In 2006, the Richemont Group purchased 20% of the company’s share capital, and in the same year, Greubel and Forsey worked with…
This watch has long been part of the Glashütte Original collection, and even though the brand connects it to the world of navigation at sea, I personally find it close to the pilot’s watch aesthetic, with its black dial, generous green SuperLuminova, and Arabic numerals that are vertical in all positions. There are extra elements,…
Major trends: The biggest watch fair in the world revealed some major overall trends. First and most important, the battle is being waged above all in the lower luxury tier, from 800 to 4,000 Swiss francs (about the same in euro). Brands that were previously principally working below this tier – quartz brands – are…
Company profile: The origins of Girard-Perregaux are conventionally dated to 1791, when Jean-François Bautte signed his first watches. He became well-known for his extra-thin watch models, and set up a company in Geneva with the idea of having all the crafts involved in watchmaking under one roof, at that time an innovative concept. Working separately,…
Peter Carl Fabergé’s mission, as supplier to the Tsar, was “to surprise and delight,” and this year in Baselworld the brand did exactly that, not only with the first imperial egg after 99 years – an incredible piece with 139 pearls, over 3,000 diamonds, yellow and white gold, carved mother-of-pearl and rock crystal, with a…
This is an exceptional minute repeater, because, like few others, you can hear it across a room. Like the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept RD#1, the sound is louder when the watch is worn on the wrist. At the same time, an open architecture reveals the movement, with both the tourbillon and the striking mechanism…
This year at Baselworld, Breguet presented an exceptional series of pieces, with four innovative men’s watches and some fine women’s jewellery pieces. The men’s watches comprised the preview piece, the Tradition Automatique Seconde Rétrograde 7097 and the piece reviewed here, the Breguet Tradition Chronographe Indépendant 7077. The 7077 chronograph does a lot of things differently with…
Undoubtedly one of the highlights of Baselworld 2015 and one that has everyone talking, because the Patek Philippe Calatrava Pilot Travel Time, reference 5524, is the first Patek Philippe pilot’s watch for quite a time, and because it naturally resembles pieces by other brands with a strong tradition in the pilot’s watch sector. “It looks…
At Baselworld 2015 I was expecting from Hermès another deliciously ironic piece such as last year’s L’Heure Masquée, but the brand seems to have decided that they have reached the end of the line of those quirky masterpieces and have moved in another direction. I was pleasantly surprised. Simplicity and a new typeface The major launch…
Omega’s new model presented at Baselworld 2015 is the Globemaster, an attractive 39-mm three-hander with a dial that is faceted on the hour ring and with a fluted bezel that recalls the early Constellation watches (and also another little brand called Rolex). As Omega president Stephen Urquhart said, the Globemaster is about “innovation, implementation and industrialization,”…
On the face of it, they seem to be quite a long way apart. But the precision metalwork that can be found in both fine watchmaking and gunmaking is a common denominator, as suggested by the terminology: barrel and calibre, to name just two terms. In Switzerland and other locations, the craftsmen who worked on…
A day from the official opening, I’m wondering what the major themes are going to be. Of course, at Baselworld, nobody talks about the Apple Watch, which means that everyone is talking about it and the effect that it will have on the industry. Voices off say that in Hong Kong, a few of the…
It seems to be the year of the annual calendars. De Grisogono have released information about their new Instrumento N° Uno Annual Calendar, which has all the quirky asymmetry of the Instrumento models, with two extra digital windows, one for date at 12 o’clock, and one for month at 7 o’clock. There is a small…
IWC have always had a 2,000 metre diving watch in their collection (Aquatimer Automatic 2000, water resistance 200 bar equivalent to 2,000 metres), and Rolex developed the Deepsea Special experimental watch built to resist the high pressure of deepwater diving at sea. CX Swiss Military Watch have now launched a 20,000 feet watch, so…
This watch has had a long development. It began in around 2006 from a concept by two young watchmakers, Johnny Girardin and Franck Orny, who were inspired by Transformers-type robots and wanted to create a watch that would change appearance and function. Metamorphosis I, presented in 2010, had a teardrop shape, and a transformation process…