The Raider Bivouac 9000 by Favre-Leuba is a practical watch designed for mountaineers, incorporating an altimeter which shows air pressure and your altitude from 0 to 9,000m. It is a large watch in titanium, 48 mm in diameter and 18.7 mm in thickness. It incorporates an aneroid chamber whose movements power the altimeter function. Clear…
The Lady Arpels Planétarium by Van Cleef & Arpels does something ambitious. It reduces the vast expanses of space into a women’s watch 38 mm in diameter. To be more specific, the 149,600,000 million kilometres – which is also known as 1 AU, Astronomical Unit – separating the earth and the sun are scaled down…
IWC Schaffhausen is celebrating its 150th anniversary with this interesting watch, IWC Tribute to Pallweber, based on pieces in their historic collection. In addition to three wristwatch variants, it is also available as a pocket watch. They are all limited editions. Both the new Tribute to Pallweber and the original pocket watches that were made…
Mechanical watches with digital displays are rarer than most, and they have a long history. This year at SIHH, IWC celebrates its 150th anniversary with the “Tribute to Pallweber” edition. Last year, 2017, François-Paul Journe presented the third edition in the Vagabondage Series, named simply Vagabondage III. Digital displays, the problem is energy management The…
Avvent’Ora by Vincent Calabrese and his company NHC (Nouvelle Horlogerie Calabrese) is a watch with a political mission. The watch has conventional hour and minute hands, and the dial has a trapezoidal window positioned between two hour markers. Every hour, this part of the dial rotates through 30°, and a trapezoidal aperture opens between adjacent…
For ten years now, Hermès have been combining their French DNA with Swiss watchmaking, and their watches include complications that provide an alternative, ironic depiction of time. The Hermès vision is not about performance and the absolute control of time, but rather a more playful view of this fourth dimension. In 2011, Arceau Le temps…
Monsieur de Chanel is a beautiful watch, with Chanel’s first in-house movement, and an intriguing jumping hours and retrograde minutes display. Chanel launched Monsieur de Chanel in beige and white gold in 2016, and at Baselworld 2017 the brand presented the same watch with black enamel dial and a platinum case. Minimalist perfection It’s an…
Occasionally you see a watch that does something completely different. This is the area of “nouvelle horlogerie,” and Dōdekal One D110 by MCT, Manufacture Contemporaine du Temps, is the perfect example. The watch has a large digital hours display right at the centre, with the looks of the classic luminous digit that was a feature…
The Panthère Joueuse by Cartier is a lovely concept, superbly executed in terms of both jewellery and movement. A panther cub in diamonds, with two emerald eyes and touches of black in lacquer, rotates around the dial, the paw indicating the minutes. It is chasing after a ball, a single diamond, that marks the hours.…
The UR-106 Flower Power by Urwerk is a new version of the 106 watch with wandering hours, launched in 2015. The diamond-setting has been extended from the case and crown to include flowers incorporated into the wandering hour satellites. The case has a more feminine size with respect to the men’s versions but it’s still…
Urwerk are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, with the UR-T8. It’s like their previous UR 105 T-Rex, with a wandering hours display and a distinctive pyramid-studded carapace, but in the T8 the watch has been given two sides, one with the wandering hours left substantially open to view, and the other in which the…
The intelligent design that hallmarks all watches by Ressence can already be seen in the name. Type 12, giving the idea of the second version of type 1 Type 1.2), but also Type 1 Squared, expressing the fundamental difference, a cushion-shaped case that adds an element of tradition and makes it dressier. Other new features…
Bronze is not just a trend, it’s a mega trend. Along with blue dials, it’s one of the most transversal developments in contemporary watches, at all levels of price. The Sequential Two S220 Bronze by Manufacture Contemporaine du Temps has the classic rotating-prisms architecture to show the hours on very large numerals, with a conventional…
The Vingt-8 ISO by Kari Voutilainen does something unusual for a wristwatch: it presents a different way of telling the time. There are still the hour and minute hands, and a conventional hour scale, but the minutes scale at the edge of the dial rotates at the same speed as the hour hand. So every…
Hautlence is dedicated to making watches that tell time in a different way, as in this piece, Vortex Bronze. The Vortex was first presented in 2015 in a titanium case, and at SIHH 2017, Hautlence presented a new edition of 8 pieces in bronze. It has the same innovative HL2.0 movement, and similar case architecture.…
There is a lot of good stuff in this new watch Maestro by Christophe Claret. At his Manufacture in Le Locle, he makes movements for other brands such as Ulysse Nardin, and so he has no problem about rethinking calibres and giving them a totally new construction. In this piece, the cantilevered bridges based on…
Not many brands make concept watches – timepieces made purely for research and not for sale. Ulysse Nardin created their Innovision 1 watch in 2007, and the inventions in that piece were progressively transferred to their production watches. Ten years on, the brand intends to do the same with its InnoVision 2. It comprises ten…
To say that the Excalibur Quatuor by Roger Dubuis is an example of thinking out of the box would be a negative exaggeration. It has literally exploded the box. Abraham-Louis Breguet invented the tourbillon to constantly vary the position of the balance and even out the variations in rate caused by gravity. Roger Dubuis thought:…
The Ovale Pantographe by Parmigiani Fleurier is a watch unique in the world. Its hands change in length as they progress around the dial. Parmigiani first launched this concept in 2011 with the Parmigiani 114, later released as the Ovale Pantographe in 2013. This year, the Ovale Pantographe is available in two limited editions, in…
In this watch by Van Cleef & Arpels presented at SIHH in January 2017, a butterfly on the dial flaps its wings automatically every so often, and on demand using a pusher. There is a long tradition of automaton clocks and watches – principally by Jaquet Droz – but Van Cleef & Arpels can claim…