Panerai is an official partner of the 35th America’s Cup, and it has launched a series of watches made in collaboration with the event, and with the two teams Oracle Team USA and Softbank Team Japan. The most complex of these special edition watches is the Panerai Luminor 1950 Regatta Oracle Team USA 3 Days…
MB&F do a lot of things differently. With their Final Edition of Legacy Machine N°1, they are introducing another innovation: concluding a series with a special model that will be the last. 435 LM1 pieces have been built since its launch in 2011, making it MB&F’s second-most successful model after Horological Machine N°3. “Only by…
Women’s preferences as regards watches are a debated question. The main dichotomy is between quartz and mechanical. Brands such as Glashütte Original use quartz for their Pavonina watches and say that women prefer quartz because the watch is always running and so doesn’t need fiddly adjustment on a small crown. But, talking to a woman…
Limes, part of the Ickler stable that also owns Archimede, has introduced a new version of its Pharo DayDate. This is an attractive but relatively rare complication, and Limes’ version has touches of refinement such as the Clous-de-Paris guilloché dial, the fluting on the case side and blue Breguet hands. Case and dial The case…
Patek Philippe’s World Time for women is a variation of a watch that is already part of the catalogue. The new version has a white gold case 36 mm in diameter, a bezel set with 62 diamonds, and a blue-grey hand-guilloché dial, confirming the ongoing success of the blue-dial trend. The alligator strap is in…
Zenith is one of the few brands making watches in the early pilot’s style to have a genuine historic prototype on which to base its new models. The original timepiece made for Louis Blériot in 1909 set the scene for pilot’s watches, with its cathedral hands, large, chunky numerals, and a crown large enough to…
The Heritage Banana by Tissot celebrates an anniversary, a rather unusual one for watchmaking: the Russian Revolution. A Russian customer bought a gold Tissot watch in 1916, and sent it back to Tissot in 1917 for maintenance and safekeeping during the October Revolution. Tissot were not able to return it due to import restrictions on…
Baselworld is an enormous show, and this year it ran for a week starting from 23 March. The major trends emerging from the stands were a confirmation of the popularity of blue dials, the rise of sports watches – pieces with some features of diving watches but intended for everyday use – a move towards…
The inspiration for this Jaquet Droz watch came from a sketch made by Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz (Pierre’s son), for an automaton of a cherub on a chariot drawn by a butterfly. From 1768 to 1774, Pierre and Henri-Louis created some extraordinary automata, such as The Writer (a boy who dips a pen into an inkwell and…
The Defy El Primero 21 by Zenith was undoubtedly one of the highlights of Baselworld 2017. With its chronograph seconds hand flashing around the dial once a second, and its movement that ensures timekeeping precision by means of two gear chains and two regulators, one for time and one for the chronograph, it is a…
The Château de Môtiers 40 Papillon by Bovet 1822 is a watch with a mother-of-pearl dial painted with a butterfly motif. The unusual feature is that it is painted with both conventional colour and luminescent paint, so that it takes on new life in the dark. Bovet say that the difficult part of the process…
The Tudor Clair de Rose has been completely reworked with respect to the 2013 version that had some interesting design touches, such as the rose forming the continuous seconds indicator (instead of a seconds hand) and the quirky crown protector. In the new 2017 Clair de Rose, Tudor have returned to a more classical design,…
At Baselworld 2017, Ateliers deMonaco presented two new La Sirène timepieces, derived from the original 2009 watch inspired by Princess Charlene of Monaco (whose nickname is La Sirène, referring to her career as a swimmer that culminated in her participation in the 2000 Olympics). The two watches, one set with diamonds, the other with rubies,…
Brief company profile: Ateliers deMonaco was born as a tribute to a movement, and two years later, its founders decided to dedicate it to a city. The principal motive for its foundation was a minute repeater movement created over the course of two years by Pim Koeslag, a Dutch watchmaker born in 1981, who was…
The Tudor Heritage Black Bay Chrono, the first chronograph in the Black Bay family, has an unusual appearance, with elements recalling both motorsports and diving. The watch has a 41 mm case, with a circular-brushed steel bezel engraved with a tachymetric scale, so that you can read off speeds by timing a unit mile or…
Watches by Pierre DeRoche always have something a bit unusual. For one thing, this is the first watch by the brand to have a solid dial: all their other watches, such as the TNT Chrono 43 or the TNT Royal Retro Skull, have deconstructed dials that reveal part of the movement. The TNT GMT Power…
In-house. The capability of designing and building a mechanical watch movement is becoming increasingly important in watch marketing. There are different degrees of “in-house,” starting from companies such as Rolex and Jaeger-LeCoultre which make just about everything themselves, to others that design and assemble their own movements but buy some of the components from specialist…
Sports watches were one of the dominant themes at Baselworld 2017: the sort of watches that borrow some features of diving watches but are intended more for general use than specifically for diving. They generally have the water resistance of diver’s watches, enabling them to be kept on while swimming, diving, or just hiking in…
The Rolex Oyster Perpetual Yacht-Master II is the perfect example of the Rolex way: gradual modifications to an existing model, improving functionality and appearance. The 2017 Yacht-Master II doesn’t have all that much that is new – a triangular hour marker at 12 o’clock, a rectangular hour marker at 6 o’clock, new hour and minute…
Breitling has redesigned the Superocean Héritage line, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the collection. A comparison show that the new Superocean Héritage II is not so different from the 1957 model, which had an endearing arrangement of circular and spike-form hour markers, shorter hands and no date window: And it’s not so different from the…