Mechanical watches for women are rare objects, and purpose-designed women’s mechanical watches are even rarer. All too often they are simply men’s watches scaled down and dressed up with gemstones. Tortue Lady by Claude Meylan, a brand based in Vallée de Joux (Switzerland) specializing in skeleton watches, is a beautiful and intelligent timepiece for women.…
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…
Skydance is a women’s watch by the brand Louis Moinet presented on occasion of the Geneva show SIHH. In addition to the Richemont Group brands – Panerai, Cartier, Piaget, Van Cleef & Arpels, Vacheron Constantin, IWC and so forth – SIHH also presents some smaller, artisanal brands. LVMH brands Hublot, Zenith and Tag Heuer are…
The Saxon One Lady by Tutima is a nice size for women at 36 mm, 10.7 mm thick, and the cushion-shaped dial with flat truncated pyramid styling gives it distinctive looks. The basic model has a stainless steel case with differentiated satin and gloss finish, and more elaborate models have a ring of 48 diamonds…
Walter von Känel, born in 1941 and president of Longines since 1988, doesn’t have a computer in his office. He doesn’t have a smartphone. But he knows everyone in his company, and through his team of assistants, he knows every model in the vast Longines collection. More importantly, he knows how many are sold, and…
It’s always a pleasure to see a mechanical watch for women, and even more so when it’s as good-looking as this. The new Metro collection by Tiffany & Co. is hallmarked by an asymmetric case, which determines the shape of the unique bracelet with a series of gracefully curved elements, designed to emphasize the space…
The Excalibur 36 Automatic by Roger Dubuis has a black-blue-white colour scheme, rather like the Pirelli colours that can be seen in the Excalibur Spider Pirelli, but with a more feminine sensuality – though Roger Brand say that this watch will appeal to men as well. The 36-millimetre black DLC-treated titanium case, 9.8 mm thick,…
Emile Chouriet’s clients are predominantly Chinese, as the vast majority of the brand’s retail outlets are in China, and the owner and CEO is Chinese. But Emile Chouriet have a factory in Geneva, and they are dedicating a lot of effort to reinforcing the Swissness of their watches. Soleos Lady 30 mm has Emile Chouriet’s…
It’s typical of A. Lange & Söhne that the view through the caseback is far more showy than what you see on the front. The slim case and narrow bezel highlight the wide open space of the mother-of-pearl dial, where everything is reduced to the minimum. Turn it over and you see the engraved balance…
The Little Lange 1 Moon Phase is a women’s watch with all the prestige of A. Lange & Söhne’s watchmaking sophistication. It mixes feminine grace with the fascination of a hand-wound movement. It follows the 2016 Lange 1 moon phase, which is 1.7 mm larger, and basically a men’s watch. Unlike that watch, the Little…
The Elite Lady Moonphase by Zenith has a size perfect for women, 33 mm diameter, with a case thickness of 9.25 mm. With respect to the previous version, its size has been reduced from 36 mm to 33 mm. It is powered by the self-winding Elite Calibre 692, designed and built in-house by Zenith, and…
Bucherer describe their new jewelled Manero Peripheral as a women’s watch, but personally I think that this timepiece is virtually unisex. The diamonds on the bezel are discreet and almost have a functional aspect: there are sixty diamonds, and so they mirror the divisions of the minute scale. The version with a chocolate-brown mother-of-pearl dial…
Many brands like to make watches that look more expensive than they actually are, in order to give purchasers the feeling of getting a good deal. Audemars Piguet makes expensive watches and in some of their recent releases have enjoyed themselves in giving them a sportier, younger, trendier appearance. The Audemars Piguet Chronograph Summer Edition…
The new Happy Sport watches released by Chopard for summer 2017 are women’s watches that demonstrate some of the major trends in contemporary timepieces. Quartz movements make things easy for their users, at least until the battery runs out. Previous versions of Happy Sport already had interchangeable straps, and this user-friendly characteristic is enhanced by…
Archimede has presented a new dress watch, Klassik 36 BIC. Dress watches are usually a male accessory; the Klassik 36 BIC is 36 mm in diameter and so is ideal for women, or for men with smaller wrists, though in actual fact it looks fine on just about anyone, and 36 mm was the classic…
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…
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…
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…