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…
A couple of days ago, I looked at chronographs with an alternative system of displaying elapsed time with respect to the usual display of multiple subdials that can run the risk of looking something like a gas meter. Today, it’s the turn of an Italian designer who creates watches specifically to look like a gauge.…
Not so much something we want to see at the upcoming watch show SIHH in January, but something we want to hear. This Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept Acoustic Research watch – whose name has now been confirmed as the Royal Oak Concept RD#1 – took eight years of development and three patents pending, and just…
This was something that I was thinking about a few months back, but at that time I was thinking about a watch that could change colour by means of a dial formed of rotating triangular-section prisms. As a prism has three faces, if you want to use a block of prisms to display a number,…
At the moment, the new range of watches by Trussardi includes just one mechanical watch (the chronograph on the left in this photo), with all the others powered by quartz movements. The watches are the result of a deal between fashion brand Trussardi and the Morellato group, the latter a company based near Padua, Italy,…
In my experience, one of the practical problems with many conventional chronographs – the ones with two or three subdials for minutes and hours, which often end up looking a bit like a gas meter – is that they are often partly obscured by the minute or hour hand. These hands are usually much larger…
This post on the best day-date watches 2014 looks at one of the most universal and practical types of watches, with just time indications, plus the date, and the day written in full at the top of the dial in a segment-circular window. All the essential information, shown clearly and legibly. There aren’t all that…
This is an idea that you would have expected from Swarovski, a watch with a sapphire crystal cut so that the sides of the watchglass resemble a gemstone, but in fact it was thought up by Dolce & Gabbana. The case in pink gold, 24 x 24 mm, is also faceted, and likewise the crown,…
This watch has a case design dating back to 1945, but its style looks back even further to the Art Deco period. It has now been released in a new version with sapphire dial that provides a look into the in-house GP 03300-0105/0062 movement. The neat function is the jumping date, with two wheels that…
Actually not twenty, but a few more: how can you resist adding as many as possible of these incredible machines! A tourbillon is one of those watch categories that separates the sheep from the goats. It’s not a third-party movement that you can buy from a manufacturer and assemble into your own case. And its so…
The Opéra is a watch by Saint Honoré, a women’s watch in two sizes, 33 and 37 mm, with mother of pearl dial set with six diamonds, stainless steel case, and a quartz movement. In the Opéra “Piano Edition” launched at Baselworld 2014, it has a feature that I think is a good idea and…
This watch is an indication of the increasing attention dedicated to mechanical movements with complications for women. In fact, the Rendez-Vous Ivy Minute Repeater is the first minute repeater in Jaeger-LeCoultre’s collection for women, and it was was presented at a “sound lab” at SalonQP in London, 6-8 November, in which customers were introduced to…
Vacheron Constantin continue their 12-year journey through the Chinese zodiac with this watch dedicated to the year of the goat, which begins on 19 February 2015. This limited edition is available in two variants, pink gold and platinum, with 12 pieces for each. So definitely a piece for Chinese collectors, presumably with a price tag…
I was excited when I saw news about the Longines Conquest 1/100th Horse Racing, a chronograph with a hand that indicates elapsed time to the nearest one-hundredth of a second. Then I saw that it’s a watch with a quartz movement and I was less excited, but even so, it’s a piece with an attractive function, designed…
It’s something that’s been seen before in fashion, the idea of coordinated garments for him and her that reinforce the “couple” idea. Shanghai Tang, for example, in the image below, have done it with subtlety, so that they are not exactly matching, but complementary. A.Lange & Söhne are doing it in watches. The Lange 1…