Company profile: Arnold & Son was launched in 1995 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, yet in 2014 the brand celebrated its 250th anniversary by presenting five new manufacture movements. How can a brand just two decades old have two and a half centuries of history? By the purchase of the right to use the name of…
Arnold & Son say that this is the first “wandering hours and true beat seconds” watch, inspired by mid-18th century table clocks. Without doubt it is an unusual way of showing the time, by a company whose mission is, at least in part, dedicated to throwing more light onto the historical importance of British watchmaker…
John Arnold was a watchmaker working in the late 1700s, and, together with Abraham-Louis Breguet, he did a lot to shape modern watches, introducing inventions such as the overcoil balance spring, and working with the great French watchmaker on innovations such as the tourbillon. The very first tourbillon movement was actually built by Breguet and…
This watch, in a 46mm red gold case, 12.28 mm thick, has a lot of traditional watchmaking features, but its open-dial design gives it a modern appearance. The design is cleverly laid out with perfect symmetry, revealing how energy flows from the first mainspring barrel (on the right) on to the second barrel on the…
Occasionally we bloggers get invited by watch brands to their head office, factories and museums. It’s a great way of understanding their individual approach to their trade and so I never say no to this sort of opportunity. The episode whose memory still brings drops of anxious sweat to my brow occurred in Milan, one…
We are accustomed to high-end watches as being complicated machines; the more complicated they are, the more expensive they are. Even the simplest watch has about 160 components, all separately machined and then assembled by a watchmaker, in a movement that is displayed through a transparent caseback. Each additional complication, such as a chronograph, a…
Blue dials and moon phase indications have been popular watch themes for the last couple of years, and in this piece, Arnold & Son put them together and make the moon phase bigger and better. The whole dial is dedicated to the moon phase window, something that is usually relegated to just a subdial, and…
On a clear night in the mountains, you look up into the darkness and see the stars, and you know that the photons reaching your retina have been travelling through space at a speed of 186,000 miles per hour for hundreds of years. Your today is someone else’s long distant yesteryear. The mystery of time…
This watch, like its predecessors the Bremont Jaguar MKII and MKI presented earlier this year, is a hymn to the E-Type Jag. I imagine that a watch brand has to consider this sort of operation carefully, because the timepiece inevitably expresses more of the identity of the car than the watch brand itself (other similar…
At its first Hong Kong watch auction on 1 December 2015, Phillips sold watches by Patek Philippe, Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Cartier and others. The extraordinary value attained in particular by Patek Philippe as collectors’ items was shown by the fact that all top five lots were timepieces by this brand, and the top…
Ulysse Nardin have an impressive ability to make watches that look very different to most and that incorporate a lot of design thought. The Executive Lady, a model first introduced in 1996, is a watch for women in three stylish colours with a lot of diamond glitter on bezel and dial, but nonetheless it has…
Company profile: Sotirios Boulgaris was born in 1857 in the village named Kalarites in the Epirus mountains in Greece, the son of Bulgarian immigrants. The area has a long tradition of jewellery-making in silver and he began his career as a jeweller in the village of Paramythia where had grown up. But he realized that…
The Octo family by Bulgari was launched in 2012 and it is becoming a central pillar of the brand’s watch collection. Many new models were presented in 2015, all based on the slim case architecture that reached a high point last year with the presentation of the world’s thinnest tourbillon. The case was designed (and…
Alpina has presented the Startimer Pilot Chronograph Big date 201st Squadron Limited edition, a tribute to the Mexican Expeditionary Air Force’s 201st Squadron which fought in the Second World War and became familiar worldwide as the “Aztec Eagles.” In 1945, volunteer pilots between 20 and 22 years old travelled to the Pacific war zone, and…
Ralph Lauren Watch & Jewelry Co., a joint venture between Richemont Group and Ralph Lauren, is not exhibiting at the Geneva fair Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) in 2016. The joint venture was signed in 2007, and the first Ralph Lauren watches were presented in January 2009 at SIHH. From then Ralph Lauren…
Snyper even makes diamonds seem tough and macho. Their Ironclad chronograph is massive, 53 mm in diameter, in stainless steel, and it has a bezel set with 48 diamonds, either black or white. In the case of black diamonds, the case has a black PVD finish. The watch has the brand’s trademark bars on the…
Van Cleef & Arpels have released news about one of their new watches that they will be presenting at the upcoming show SIHH, taking place in Geneva from 18 to 22 January 2016. The brand specializes in a very poetic depiction of time (their description The Poetry of Time is a registered trademark), in which…
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for your better half, and you have a budget of around £1.4 million, Blancpain has just the thing, available at Harrods in December. The Tourbillon Diamonds is powered by Blancpain’s Calibre 25A, a self-winding mechanical movement with 239 parts, providing a 7-day power reserve. The tourbillon can be…
This piece by Frédérique Constant could be a nice chronograph at a relatively accessible price, €2,850, attractive for its uncluttered dial. It is a tribute to vintage motor sports with its perforated leather strap and the Healey logo below the central pivot, celebrating the NOJ 393 Healey racing car. The racing green on the two…
Nothing displays the passage of the years better than this tribute to an electronic game that looks so incredibly dated, with its 8-bit pixelated graphics. According to psychological studies, the use of nostalgia to sell products is most effective when the thing remembered was something that we were doing in late adolescence, so when we…