Portugieser Perpetual Calendar 44, Ref. IW503701
Since its appearance almost 40 years ago, IWC’s perpetual calendar has set the bar for efficiency and user-friendliness. In the new Portugieser Perpetual Calendar 44, we’ve packaged the ingenious complication in a case with a slimmer ring and boxshaped sapphire lenses that make it even lighter and more elegant.
That being said, now it’s your turn to keep looking good for the next centuries.
Welcome once again to the world of fine watches, spied through Port’s particular lens. Fittingly, this is issue number 10 of our biannual 10:10 supplement, named after the V-for-victory arrangement of hands in almost every depiction of a watch dial.
Our theme this time around is the duality of watchmaking. Since the advent of atomic clocks in the 70s, ‘horology for the sake of it’ has yielded to two extremes: nostalgic utility, and the wilfully performative.
Ironically, each has its merits in the 21st century, regardless of relying on your iPhone for the ‘actual’ time. Your no-nonsense tin-can of a diving watch or showboating tourbillon now celebrate – by virtue of watchmaking’s excruciatingly exacting design and manufacture – more aspects of human endeavour and culture than any other object, in equal measure.
In this issue, we round up the latest ‘in the field’ and ‘just because’ creations coming out of Switzerland’s high-altitude valleys or Geneva’s lakeside environs. Separately, we have IWC’s economic, now-iconic answer to two members of the Portuguese merchant navy, in contrast to Richard Mille and Louis Vuitton’s flamboyant evolutions of the sports watch. For such an archaic craft, it’s heartening to see such variation – all bound by centuries-old technology that could well have been wiped out.
Deck shoes might not be coming down the catwalk during couture week, but a Rolex Yacht-Master will always belong on the frow next to a Vacheron Constantin grande complication, whether it ever weighs anchor or not.
Alex Doak Editor
Michel Parmigiani foresaw the future of his craft, but also a need to conserve its past
“Restoring antique timepieces is to receive hands-on tutorage from the past’s masters,” wrote Svend Andersen for 10:10’s foreword one year ago. The man should know: he was entrusted to restore a good chunk of Patek Philippe’s trophy cabinet in preparation for its Geneva museum opening in the 80s.
At the same time, up in the Jura mountains to the north of Andersen’s town, a young man called Michel Parmigiani also recognised how badly his country’s horological heritage was under threat. Even in sleepy Fleurier village, quartz technology’s decimation of the local cottage industry cast this teenager as quite the oddball – surely mechanical watchmaking was thoroughly doomed by the time he would graduate?
Nonetheless, Parmigiani’s dogged antique-clock restoration business attracted the investment of the pharma giant, and his biggest client, Sandoz-Fondation de Famille. His eponymous brand was forged in a way that only a restorer could: by dissecting the methods of the past, reimagining them with a contemporary slant, and passing that knowledge on. If you need any proof of his creations’ future-proofness, the Toric on King Charles III’s wrist during the coronation was one of his first.
It’s been a birthday tradition for him, adding something to his ‘Objets d’Art’ collection yearly. For 2023, the latest resto’ to be unveiled in parallel to his slick wrist-worn line is the one-off L’Armoriale pocket watch. At its heart ticks a movement dating from 1890, signed ‘A. Golay Leresche & Fils à Geneva’, showcasing a chronograph in combination with a minute repeater whose two tiny hammers chimeout the hours, quarters and minutes on demand, on two wire gongs.
A mechanical wristwatch is the closest you’ll get to a man-made living thing, they say, so it must be nurtured. Sure enough, it was 1985 when Michel Parmigiani first breathed new life into the Golay movement in question – a spectacular constellation of serpentine bridges, levers and gearwork – enhancing it with a calendar in the process. And now a moonphase indicator, set against a ‘night sky’ sparkling in aventurine… but then, the case: an enamel masterpiece.
Overlapping petal recesses meticulously engraved by hand across the whole 58mm-wide expanse of white gold. Then painstakingly filled and oven-fired, over and over by one of Parmigiani’s artisans using crushed, coloured silica. Artisans who’d now be doing something completely different if it wasn’t for the likes of Svend or Michel in the 80s.
September will always hath 30 days, but 2024 has already seen another ‘leap’, tying-off, for another four years, our antiquated Gregorian calendar and its misalliance with our ultimate clockface: the night sky.
Rather satisfyingly, February’s additional 29th day saw the timely unveiling of Blancpain’s latest Perpetual Calendar, in a green dial mirroring the fir forests that surround its venerable ateliers, nestled in the Swiss Jura’s Vallée de Joux.
The quantième perpétuel is an equally venerable horological invention, whose tiny central cam – tucked immediately beneath the day, date and month subdials – completes a single turn every four years, co-ordinating a convoluted ballet of levers and other cams so you never need adjust your watch’s date display.
Well, except on secular years of centuries divisible by 400. Hence, 2000 was a leap year, but as every perpetual calendar enthusiast knows all too well, 2100 won’t be. Nor 2200 and 2300 for that matter. A bizarre make-do-andmend you can blame on some arrogant Roman emperors, equally pompous popes and two 2nd-century-BC astronomers making some astonishingly accurate observations for their time.
Luckily, Blancpain isn’t resting on its laurels: the new red-gold version of a notoriously finicky complication comes with secure updates protecting the calendar mechanism from damage if the wearer adjusts the date while it’s changing, via corrector buttons concealed discreetly beneath the straps’ horns.
“Pinch, punch…”, and so it goes. Blancpain Villeret Quantième Perpétuel is available in red gold, £47,100 at blancpain.com
Coming Once In Four
February 29th posed no problem for anyone wearing a Blancpain perpetual calendar this year
Pitch Perfect
Piaget’s Polo was as much ‘Chaka Khan’ as ‘chukka’ in 1979, and a lush new revival gets back into the groove
In 1972, a single designer made an indelible mark on the modern watchscape (not to mention Portofino’s waterfront) by inventing the luxurious sports watch as we know it. Swiss maestro Gérald Genta’s potent cocktail of boldly geometric steel and barefacedly exposed screw heads flowing into an integrated bracelet remains as funkadelic as ever, with recent years seeing a flurry of ‘inspired-by’ releases.
From A. Lange & Söhne to Zenith, luxury timekeeping as outré accessorising remains indebted to Genta’s
revolutionary blueprint: the octagonal Royal Oak of 1972, dashed off in a single night at the behest of Swiss blue blood, Audemars Piguet, who’d spied a potent market in the Italian jet set at a time when quartz watches were pummelling the traditional craft.
Genta followed up by drafting Patek Philippe’s equally enduring and equally rakish Nautilus in 1976, then a sleek DeLorean-like facelift for IWC’s antimagnetic Ingenieur – slick yacht-rockers that breathed new life into stuffy pedigrees.
The scion of Switzerland’s most historic movement maker, Yves Piaget was something of a playboy himself, with a penchant for the equestrian.
Riding (so to speak) on the wave of Genta’s ‘sporty-luxe’ phenomenon, he fused his love of horses and the highlife in a single timepiece, which became emblematic of 80s glam, right up there with Cartier’s similarly geometric Santos, or Chopard’s St Moritz, recently reborn as Alpine Eagle.
The house of Piaget’s Polo was
1 Ultimate Bond Girl Ursula Andress hangs out with Piaget boss and impassioned equestrian Yves Piaget, 1983
2 The campaign leveraged by Piaget’s Polo set the tone for the 80s sporty discoluxe glam, in defiance of the devastating toll wrought by cheap plastic quartz watches from East Asia
equally at home luxuriating in the booths of Manhattan’s Régine’s as pelting the turf of Palm Beach polo clubs. What’s more, it was evidently coined to perfection at the time, since the Polo 1979’s original features have barely needed tweaking in 2024’s lounge lizard of a reissue, save for the ultra-thin ‘1200P-1’ mechanics ticking within (the gold micro-rotor keeps things wound up, but more importantly is wafer-thin, since it spins flush with the surrounding mechanics, rather than on top).
The case and dial’s seamless horizontal grooves – or reverse-fluted ‘gadroons’, to adopt the artisanal jargon – still flow sinuously into the bracelet, in Genta-esque integrated fashion, and are still hand-polished chez Piaget, up in remote La Côte-auxFées, to a flawless interplay of brushed and mirror finish.
Gérald Genta may have been all about the wheels of steel, but Yves’ promise to those who “want to be exquisite, even in sport” remains 24-carat.
Forget Rolex and its ‘Emoji’ date display of last year: Oris is the OG brand when it comes to injecting fun into watchmaking. Back in 2021 it turned the dials of its iconic Divers Sixty-Five candy coloured and had men asking whether they could get away with a rough-hewn bronze diving watch popping with a Pepto Bismol dial. Then came the swoonsome salmon-pink hued ProPilot X Calibre 400, followed swiftly by the Kermit Edition – yes, as in the Muppet who found being green hard.
Oris certainly didn’t find it hard to sell its witty experimentation in green, which replaced the date window’s ‘1’ with the smiling face of everyone’s favourite frog, inviting wearers to take a moment every month to enjoy a ‘Kermit Day’. It became nothing less than the cult watch of 2023.
The historic watchmaker of Höl-
Oris’s unlikely adventures in hi-fi continue in cahoots with Zürich’s 9T Labs
stein has now dived into even more adventurous waters with the ProPilot X Calibre 400 Laser. Again, the incredible thing about this version of the ProPilot is the dial (and no, it doesn’t feature Miss Piggy). Yet, despite appearances, not a single colour pigment was used on it.
Instead, some friends of Oris in Zürich had fun playing with the phenomenon of light interference. Namely 9T Labs, a spin-off programme from ETH – a public research university also in Zürich set up by the Swiss federal government to educate engineers and scientists. Said phenomenon was first discovered in the 19th century by a physicist called Thomas Young who realised that light behaves as a wave, and that these waves can, under special circumstances, be manipulated so that when they interact, their combined amplitudes either increase or diminish.
In the case of the Oris ProPilot, the dial has been etched by laser so that our ability to see red waves is diminished and the ability to see green and blue is amplified. Oris has also added a second layer that splits the waves we can see to create the rainbow that shimmers as you alter your viewing angle.
If that wasn’t enough, the logo, hour markers, minute track and dial text have been given yet another laser treatment to give them a 3D appearance. All of which stands out beautifully against the more sombre titanium frame.
Given that Oris employs someone in the sole business of seeking out materials alien to stuffy Swiss watchmaking (prior to the Laser, 9T even 3D-printed a series of Oris cases in carbon fibre), who knows where the ProPilot is destined to go next. To infinity and beyond?
1 Oris’s new collab has thrown up a laser-etched dial that interferes with the reflection of trad RGB spectrum
2 Applied indices tumble about Frederique Constant’s moonphase dress piece 1
Seconde Chance
An unexpectedly off-kilter and witty reawakening for Geneva’s buttoned-down classicist
It was the collaboration no one saw coming. On the one hand you have Romaric André, a Parisian artist who goes by the name seconde/seconde/, renowned for cleverly satirising the often-po-faced nature of the Swiss watch industry. On the other, Frederique Constant, a brand synonymous with exactly that.
Together, they have self-knowingly created a Frederique Constant timepiece that might actually make people’s Watch of the Year lists.
Seconde/seconde/ burst onto the watch scene like a horological Banksy in 2018 with the aim of taking vintage timepieces and renovating them with a twist. It wasn’t long before brands were queueing up to add a little of his anarchy to their designs. And now it is Frederique Constant’s turn. To communicate that all the Swiss manufacture’s watches are assembled by hand, something Frederique Constant thought wasn’t widely known, seconde/seconde/ created a watch that
looked as though it was assembled by hand… if the person doing it was drunk and didn’t have the lights on. The indices are askew and the numerals around the moonphase, the moonphase itself and the brand’s logo look as though they were drawn by an eight-year-old.
“It was quite empirical. You basically try to find something that has a ‘look’ that can be catchy and/or cool and/or clean,” says André. “You also search for something with a meaning and/or a purpose and/or an angle. Because the product needs to tell something. Then you also need to find something that may be accepted by the brand while suiting my obsession or desire for sweet abrasiveness and ‘acidity’. This kind of sweet spot is not always easy to find but sometimes the planets align.” It is a collaboration that has taken Frederique Constant’s stuffed shirt, untucked it, undone the top button and given it a martini. And we’re very much here for it.
It’s a dream come true for chronograph geeks: Swiss institution Breitling has acquired full rights to its long-departed nemesis, Universal Genève; nothing less than the legendary marque that forged the aesthetic of a stopwatch read-out in combination with running time with economy and legibility. Even more relishable is the question of whether the confusing
Chrono-Loco
Two of history’s finest practitioners of the wrist-worn stopwatch are coming together with Breitling’s acquisition of Universal Genève
naming system of said instrumentation will finally be resolved at the ‘hands’ of a rival watchmaker that’s as guilty of misleading nomenclature as anyone else
Clipboards, half-moon specs and freshly sharpened pencils at the ready? Founded in 1894, Universal Genève rose to prominence from the 1920s (in Geneva, needless to say)
with the mantra “Precision watches, precision jewelry”. Elegant women’s cocktail watches and innovative men’s jewellery timepieces, including the reversible Cabriolet, were their speciality. “Universal Genève was once hailed as the ‘couturier’ of watchmaking, renowned for its in-house movements and mythical models,” attests Georges Kern, CEO
1 Scandinavia’s multinational SAS airline pilots receiving their Universal Genève Polerouter in the 1950s ©scandinaviantraveler
2 The chronograph assembly atelier, chez Universal, ca1965
3 Vintage advertising for the Universal Genève Tri-Compax in B2B magazine Europa Star in 1952
4 Universal Genève’s gloriously mid-century factory in the quaint suburb of Carouge, opened in 1956
of Breitling, a watchmaker more associated with RAF cockpit instruments and kitting-out the jet age’s plucky pilots as well as pioneering SCUBA experimentalists.
But it wasn’t long before Universal caught up on the burgeoning chronograph scene mid-century, matching Breitling’s Navitimer with chronographs bearing equally iconic arrays registering elapsed time with a centrally mounted sweep-seconds hand surrounded by 30-minutes and 12-hours subdials. Confusingly for future collectors, models featuring three or four sub-registers were discerned respectively as ‘Compax’ and ‘Tri-Compax’.
Swinglish whispers ensued, with not a Universal PR man to be found, since the Swiss firm went bust, like so many others, during the 1970s quartz crisis. ‘Bi-compax’ now gets trotted-out in denoting a dual-subdial minutes and hours chronograph array, which Universal actually called ‘Compur’ after the Compax in 1944. This featured one complication – the same two subdials, only with an additional subdial displaying running seconds (renamed ‘Uni-Compax’ in the 40s. Got that?).
‘Tri-compax’ nowadays gets used in reference to three-subdial chronographs, despite Universal coining the term originally in reference to its watches with three complications – chronograph, calendar and moonphase, plus running seconds, all adding up to four subdials.
Will Breitling’s marketeers dare to coin the term ‘Quadri-Compax’ and yield to modern parlance? We sense that top brass could just stick to their own chronographs, and play it safe by reviving Universal’s 1920’s jewellery pieces…
1 The Great Depression of the 30s had a silver lining for Patek Philippe’s dial-makers Frères Stern, who outbid LeCoultre to buy the established but ailing maison The Sterns remain as custodians of Geneva’s proudest family firm. Third-generation Thierry’s father Philippe was celebrated in retirement and in image by 2023’s ingenious switch-up of a family fave, the chiming minute repeater
TIMELINE
1989
Conceived 10 years ahead of the 150th anniversary, Patek Philippe’s marketing-savvy honorary president Philippe Stern saw that Switzerland needed to marry historical clout with legacy. He commissioned Calibre 89, the world’s most complicated watch: two dials displaying 33 complications. Preliminary calculations and designs began in 1980, followed by five years of research and four years of production, employing the unprecedented use of 2D computer-aided design (CAD).
2001
The second most complicated Patek Philippe wristwatch, featuring a double-face drop, the Sky Moon Tourbillon, Ref. 5002 continues a lineage of flip-side über-complications made specially for the famous pockets of American tycoons Henry Graves Jr and James Ward Packard in the early 20th century (along with the Calibre 89 itself). It’s a fabulously lush exercise in VIP-client ‘POA’ (around £4m on the aftermarket) complete with rear-side sapphire-glass depiction of the current night sky turning above Geneva, rotating at a different speed to the blue disc beneath and showing the orbiting phase of the moon.
2014
A big gap in time, but also a big jump in wrist-worn complexity: the Grandmaster Chime, Ref. 6300 celebrates 175 years since Polish emigrés Messieurs Patek et Czapek set up shop in Geneva (Adrien Philippe joining six years later). Spanning a whopping 48mm, its 20 functions are spread over two flippable dials. So special that a one-off edition in steel (steel and titanium are rarer than precious metal chez PP) sold at 2019’s Only Watch charity auction for CHF31 million, smashing every record going.
WORDS
2017
In 2005, the words “Advanced Research” started appearing on dials, indicating new adventures in high-tech. Namely, setting up shop at CSEM’s microtech skunkworks in Neuchâtel in cahoots with Swatch group and Rolex to create plasma-etching components for the ticking escapement in cleanrooms out of antimagnetic, self-lubricating silicon wafer. Twelve years on, AR extends from silicon materials science to the emerging field of ‘compliance’ – the reduction of a multipart mechanism to a flexible ‘monobloc’ metal shape. An Aquanaut shows its own through a window at 9 o’clock: a tiny steel spider’s web, nudging your local ‘Travel Time’ back or forwards as you hop time zones, reducing 37 moving parts to 12.
Grand Designs
Patek Philippe, like Rolex, is a global synonym for the finest Swiss watchmaking – mostly thanks to its command of multi-functional masterpieces
The Swiss grandmaster of flash cemented its modern reputation as ‘the collector’s collectible’ in 1989 with an unprecedented mono-brand sale curated by Genevese auctioneers Antiquorum, entitled The Art of Patek Philippe. Nine years in gestation, its poster boy was the Calibre 89, whose city-hopping exhibition threw fuel on the fire of the era’s high-horological awakening. An epic pocket watch made in just four examples (demanding pockets capacious in both senses) whose 3D jigsaw of 1,728 parts celebrated 150
2020
2019
Not a grand complication in the strictest, multi-functional sense, but the In-line Perpetual Calendar, Ref. 5236P threw in grand amounts of extra mechanics to the tune of 118 components to realise a date presented in the written-out fashion, rather than a scattershot array of day, date, month, year and leapyear indications. In other words: proof where proof wasn’t needed of Patek’s horological heroism.
years as Geneva’s favourite son; each a 88.2mm-wide compilation of complexity. Eternally correct perpetual calendar, astronomical charts, grande sonnerie chimes… and something even more impressive: a future-forward escape pod of knowledge that has guaranteed a necessarily limited legacy of grande complications, literally springing into life at the fingers of Patek’s hunched maestroes every year since. Here’s our impossible wishlist, charting the first 35 years of a brave new era in micro-mechanics.
For 2020, Patek granted 20:20 vision to the intractable works of the chime-on-demand minute repeater: the Ref. 5303, literally lifting the bonnet in a rare moment of ostentation for buttoned-up Patek Philippe. Two hammers, two circumferential and perfectly tuned gongs, plus a miasma of snail cams, levers and cams. And all without a flaw to the polish of a single edge or surface.
2022
Almost nonchalantly, Patek Philippe dropped the Ref. 5470 as its latest dabble in ‘Advanced Research’. Its first classically built chronograph movement entirely R&Ded in its Genevese workshops and accompanied by six patents. An additional chronograph mechanism is integrated to time down to a 10th of a second, all operated via one pusher and all regulated rock steadily by AR’s all-silicon Oscillomax escapement.
Alex Doak
Omega’s Constellation isn’t just named after Earth’s ultimate clockface, its dial is made of it
What you’re gazing at here is a constellation of Constellations, shimmering with actual meteorite, literally out of this world.
Omega’s Constellation has long lived up to the heady, celestial heights of its name, ever since 1994 when its original 50s design codes – chiefly, a geometrically domed ‘pie pan’ dial of 12 facets – were pinched by the revived De Ville collection, which, launched in 1967, was a ‘greatest hits’ of Omega’s pre-war dress codes.
No matter, since the Constellation’s own 1982 redux introduced a look that’s ushered one of Switzerland’s most revered marques firmly into the 21st century, thanks to bold claw case motifs at 3 and 9 o’clock.
Next was a 90s oversize iteration. Then the inevitable Master Chronometer tune-up, spiked with nothing less than the most progressive innovation in mechanical timekeeping for over 200 years: south Londoner Dr George Daniels’ co-axial escapement, which adds a second escape wheel and third prong to its locking lever to prevent sliding friction at the ‘ticking’ point of proceedings. Omega, so far, is the only brand to have adopted such new technology, in keeping with when it threw down the gauntlet to Rolex’s precision dominance in 1952 by unveiling the original Constellation (or rather ‘Constellation Chronometer’).
For what it’s worth, Omega’s bet paid off – by 1963, its precision-chronometer production was exceeding Rolex’s by 144,305 to 103,041, peaking in 1969 at 194,580, versus 179,169 for Rolex.
Things might be a little different today, sales-wise, but the name ‘Constellation’ remains especially potent, since our global network of atomic clocks are still enslaved, and occasionally adjusted, according to the night sky. Making this year’s new meteorite-dial collection even more appropriate: precise timekeeping to the backdrop of genuine stardust.
Coated and coloured with a PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) treatment, the capsule’s dials are from probably the oldest-known meteorite to have struck Earth. At over 4.5 billion years old, Muonionalusta disintegrated across a region spanning Finland and Sweden, on the banks of the Muonio river, near the remote village of Kitkiöjärvi. Thanks to the natural pattern found within this ancient celestial detritus, every slice (officially sourced and certified since its discovery in 1906) is unique. Its chiefly iron and nickel composition is distinguished by a perfectly geometrical cross-hatched Widmanstätten pattern of crystal metal (identified by the titular Austrian porcelain pioneer in 1808), with no possibility of two Omega Constellation dials being alike.
From 41mm to 25mm in diameter, whether galvanically or PVD-coated, every one Omega’s new suite of Muonoinalusta-meteorite-dial Constellations is unique, thanks to whatever astronomic events occurred over four billion years ago
Rolex is notoriously tight-lipped. At the time of writing nothing was known beyond the walls of its sprawling Geneva campus about the now-public releases for April’s big trade show.
Suffice to say, the headline-grabbers of 2023’s edition still go plenty of the way towards demonstrating the might of The Crown. And that’s with a simple steel Oyster Perpetual 41mm for £5,500, turquoise ‘Celebration’ dial dotted with multicoloured balloons. Available as new and ‘flipped’ on pre-owned marketplace Chrono24 for over three times retail.
As for the Celebration Perpetual’s jigsaw-puzzled party guest – a DayDate 36mm with 31 joyous emoji icons instead of date numerals, plus day window with ‘GRATITUDE’ instead of, say, ‘Tuesday’ – the POA on the precious few listed on Chrono24 says it all. (Between us, about £200,000.) But regardless of what the off-catalogue gold watch originally cost off the shelf, you know that those lucky VVVIP customers could afford what, these days, is a far-greater currency: access and allocation.
So how does a Swiss watchmaker – and a very good-value one at that –
Chrono Corona
A logo could seem arrogant engraved onto any other watchmaker’s winding crown, but a mythology backed by horological perfection lends Rolex full licence, even with wacky balloon dials and (no, really) an emoji window
get to make a PR-stunt emoji watch or a balloon dial rocked by hardmen like Tom Brady and Mark Wahlberg while still managing to fan the flames of desire for its properly butch diving, yachting and motor racing chronometers? How, in an industry turning somersaults on the shoulders of horological giants, has Rolex mastered such lust with neither hoopla nor fuss?
Like every blue-blooded, unilateral consumer behemoth, it comes down to product, pure and simple. There are few watches that, torn from the wrist of a scuba hobbyist diving the Great Barrier Reef, can be discovered eight years on, practically swallowed up by the coral, chipped out, reunited with its owner via the case reference number, and … with a quick shake, instantly jumpstarted, the seconds hands resuming its steady sweep.
“They’re amazing value for money,” says Peter Roberts, who started as a watchmaker at Rolex in 1972 before going on to train-up a portion of its global network of servicers. “And the majority of that value is found in the movement. In fact, compared with another watch around the £7,000 mark, the cost of the movement inside a Submariner diving
watch will be four or five times that of the other.”
Rolex may well be namechecked in equal measure to Courvoisier and Cadillacs by hip-hop’s glitterati, but bling-bling this ain’t: anyone on a tour of Rolex’s sprawling, gleaming facilities in Geneva and Bienne will instantly appreciate the painstaking effort involved in precision-machining, polishing, assembling, testing, disassembling, adjusting and finally re-assembling the hundreds of components inside a mechanical watch.
Rolex does it all and all of it inhouse – including a foundry, of all things, for its precious cases’ proprietary blend of rose gold – backgrounded by flowered slopes and clanking cows. Yet despite this sheer scale, Rolex only use a handful of ‘base’ engines, which they have tweaked and tweaked for years, making tiny incremental improvements along the way. It took until the 80s to experiment with a chronograph movement of its own, still only found in one model, the mythical Daytona (Paul Newman’s own ‘Paul Newman’ dial version holding the all-time vintage watch-auction record of $17.75m).
It’s no wonder that the vast majority of movements tested for chronometer accuracy by Switzerland’s COSC facility come from Rolex (north of a million a year). One of COSC’s three test centres is solely devoted to the marque. The fine-tuned, antimagnetic mechanics have been honed to perfection. And the production process itself has been perfected – necessarily so when you’re making over 2,500 chronometers a day, each losing or gaining less than 2 seconds a day (COSC allow 4 or 6, but that’s not good enough for The Crown).
1 The Crown of Geneva (and Bienne) denotes its majesty and water resistance very elegantly via the actual crown: two dots means ‘whitegold case’ and ‘two rubber gaskets’
2 Rolex’s Submariner campaign rightly leveraged the patronage of France’s elite COMEX commercial divers in the 60s
1 Money could buy, if access would allow: the Day-Date Emoji, £POA even on pre-owned marketplace
2 Crouched on the southwest industrial outskirts of Geneva, fortress Rolex (HQ no.2 at the other end of Lac Léman in Bienne, next door to Omega)
The Submariner was James Bond’s diving watch until the 90s; a prototype went to the depths of the Mariana Trench and an early Explorer the heights of the Himalayas, each before any other watchmaker. It is the watch of presidents and behind-enemy-lines barter currency for secret-service ops.
Technically, Rolex belies its relative youth, since founder Hans Wilsdorf oversaw nothing less than the perfection of the self-winding internal rotor (1931’s Perpetual), as well as the waterproof watch (the screwed-down rubber gaskets of 1926’s Oyster case), even the date – or emoji – window that an internal wheel of numbers – or emojis – peeps through (DateJust, 1945).
Rolex is the ur-gold watch, brandished by Alec Baldwin as the flashy realtor in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Christian Bale in American Psy-
cho (1998). The Crown’s cachet and collectability are all iconic in a world where the word ‘iconic’ seldom applies. Even theories behind that name are mythical. The party line is that Wilsdorf wanted a name pronounceable in any language, dreaming up ‘Rolex’ while listening to the sound it made being wound while sitting on a London bus in 1905. More likely, others claim, it was a Hispanic contraction of relojes excelentes, or ‘excellent watches’.
Bottom line, there’s follow-through. And while those dealership waiting lists can be frustrating for anyone wanting to lay their wrists on a blueand-red-ringed Pepsi GMT-Master II in steel, this does, dare we say it, make Rolex seem… cool?
The hills of Switzerland may be alive with ‘iconic’, but ‘cool’ is rarer than an oyster emoji.
WORDS
Laura McCreddie-Doak
PHOTOGRAPHY
Matthew Donaldson
Not by the Book
These days, ‘utilitarian’ timepieces show that practicality doesn’t mean giving up on the finer things
BELL & ROSS
BR03 Copper – £3,500
A university project between Bruno Belamich and Carlos A Rosillo (the “Bel” and “Ros” respectively) was to create watches that looked cool but were also durable and functional. Initially the look tended towards monochrome, deliberately like cockpit read-outs, however the colour palette has loop-the-looped in recent years, leading to this lovely copper BR03 –still utterly airworthy.
ROLEX
Cosmograph Daytona – £13,200
Made famous by mad-keen racer Paul Newman, Daytona has become synonymous with Rolex collectability – a nod to the titular Beach in Florida whose historic 24-hours race has the Swiss giant as its title sponsor. It’s kitted with a precision vertical-clutch chronograph, honed to perfection like every Rolex engine.
OMEGA
Speedmaster Moonwatch Chronograph “Dark Side of the Moon” Apollo 8 – £13,500
An iteration of NASA’s flight-qualified ‘Moonwatch Speedy’, first launched in 2018 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 leaving low Earth orbit and a crew venturing to the pitch-black rear of the moon. The best thing about 2024’s version is its three-dimensional replica of the Saturn V rocket, serving as the small-seconds hand.
VACHERON CONSTANTIN
Overseas Dual Time – £29,800
Back in 1996, the Overseas was intended to disrupt – a move away from the lavish excess of the 80s and a return to the streamlined sportiness that its 222nd-anniversary ‘222’ forged in 1977. A collection called “Overseas” had to be fitted with a dual travel-time function eventually, which leads us here, with a red pop of a secondary 24-hours hand wound by a decadent compass-style gold rotor. (Well, 80s or not, this is Vacheron...)
BREGUET
Marine 5527 – £37,200
Breguet makes a compelling case for gold being a practicable material for a diving watch. Or at the very least ‘water-adjacent’. Obviously, this isn’t a true diver – the lack of rotating bezel discounts it from participating in any sport involving a wetsuit. However, it is good to 100m and has a rubber strap, so perfect for poolsides.
RICHARD MILLE
74-01 Tourbillon – CHF455,000
The answer to the question, “can a tourbillon be practical?” It’s a question asked by a very elite few, but Monsieur Mille knows his customer base and caters to it. The case is made from a cermet, which, as the portmanteau suggests is a combination of ceramic and metal; the normally delicate tourbillon is engineered to be so shock-resistant, Mille famously demonstrates by throwing it across rooms.
TISSOT
PR516 Chronograph – £1,720
Like Vacheron, Tissot has spent the last few years revelling in its disco era thanks to the success of its sleek 70s-inspired PRX. Now it has plundered the previous decade but for a watch with a different sartorial flavour – a satisfyingly chunky racer powered by the classic hand-wound Valjoux 7753 calibre, harking back to Tissot’s pitlane pedigree. Pair with Persols and string-back gloves.
PATEK PHILIPPE
Calatrava 5226G – £34,620
Much more ‘pilot’ than the usual Calatrava dress pieces, this curveball from Patek Philippe at first appears pared back to the point of perversity – but there is drama in the detail. There’s the gritty texture of the gradient dial that is inspired by vintage camera cases, and the Deco-style numerals filled with sepia-beige lume.
1 The brainchild of Thierry Fischer, creative director, and two hotshots ex of Switzerland’s Renaud & Papi hothouse, Vanguart’s new Orb pirouettes a tourbillon while its titanium rotor is brought dial-side
2 Controlled back and forth by a ‘joystick’ crown, the debut Black Hole toys with time just as its titular astrological phenomenon does
3 Vanguart may be hip to the game and fashion-forward, but there’s copperbottomed nous rocket-boosting its alien mechanics
Lift-Off
Vanguart’s interstellar Black Hole and brand new Orb show the watch world just how you make a meteoric impact, from left field, out of the blue
Going into 2020, the timing probably wasn’t what you’d call ideal for launching a high-concept wristwatch brand. The finer points of any fine timepiece are impossible to convey to clients by Zoom, even if they have remembered to turn off ‘mute’. But as the founding chairman of Vanguart – an ‘artistic’ approach at the ‘vanguard’ of contemporary horology – attests, it was a blessing in disguise.
“We had two years to prove its precision and reliability,” Mehmet Koruturk says, “on wrists, every day and in the real world.
(“Well, whenever you could venture into the real world,” he adds wryly.) There was never any real doubt, as the provenance of Koruturk’s nimble-fingered, polymath co-founders doesn’t come much more golden. Axel Leuenberger and Jérémy Freléchox both hail from Audemars Piguet’s Renaud & Papi: the bleeding-edge hothouse for 21st-century horological soup-ups since the 90s (Richard Mille’s original one-stop shop, say no more). Concomitantly, it’s a hothouse for precocious talent and elite splinter brands such as Greubel Forsey
with their €200k-plus flea circuses for the wrist.
Vanguart’s opening salvo of 2019 – or a sleeper hit of 2022, however you choose to see it – was the Black Hole, just two years in development. That COVID-enforced testbed certainly guaranteed wearability, since its ‘fuselage’ as the brand likes to say, rides your wrist imperceptibly, helped by an instantly switchable, flowing rubber strap.
The eponymous vortex-like dial architecture – with a planetary body spinning above its apex in the form of a flying tourbillon carriage – isn’t just an aesthetic pun. One of what looks like two rocket boosters on the right is what Vanguart calls a ‘joystick’. And like a black hole, it genuinely distorts time: you can select between normal, reading digitally across three numerals at 9 o’clock, its concentric numeral rings flicking clockwise every passing minute; or you can switch it to a countdown, with time running backwards.
Things are now pared back for 2024, with a seemingly conventional three-hander (though still with that mesmeric saucer flying centre stage). But further inspection of the Orb reveals a diamond ‘dot’ on the circumference, orbiting back and forth. It’s the only sign of another feat in circular gymnastics from Vanguart, who’ve managed to engineer the winding rotor dial-side, rather than in its usual position riding the movement’s baseplate: a concave titanium ring spinning perfectly flush between titanium bezel and dial.
Vanguart Orb from CHF180,000 plus VAT; Vanguart Black Hole from CHF290,000 plus VAT; vanguart.com
If you want to be pedantic, every mechanical watch in the world is a sailing watch. The pressure to produce a portable timepiece, or ‘chronometer’ accurate enough to navigate the high seas led horologists of the 18th century, such as Yorkshire’s own John Harrison, to invent many of the features that are still whirring away inside your Rolex or Omega. Features like the circular oscillating pendulum, for example, first found in Harrison’s H4 pocket watch, and now present in all modern mechanicals as the tick-tick-ticking ‘balance wheel’.
Despite the best bureaucratic efforts of London’s Board of Longitude, Harrison, H4 and his three preceding clocks secured their hard-fought £20,000 prize, in proving that precise comparison between local and ‘home’ time was a far-superior method in reckoning one’s east-west progress
Decked Out Navigating at sea demands a precision timekeeper, and IWC was by sailors’ sides first
than stargazing. That the head of the board was the ‘Astronomer Royal’ gives you some idea of the resistance he encountered for decades.
Nevertheless, Harrison’s clocks are still ticking strong at longitude’s ground zero, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. By the 1830s, every merchant navy captain setting sail from east London’s docks had a handheld chronometer pocket watch, waiting for the observatory roof’s bright red time ball to drop down its pole at 1pm every day, to finely adjust its accuracy.
Today, the idea of an oceangoing watch stretches a fair few nautical miles beyond the British Empire’s basic need not to lose its dominance of valuable trade routes, let alone countless souls. Weighing anchor and cruising into the blue has continuously inspired horological experimentation such as regatta countdown timers or tide indicators, which – just like motorsport, scuba diving or mountaineering – come with a baked-in thrill factor, irresistible to chequebook-waving landlubbers. (Would two of Switzerland’s biggest aforementioned brands’ otherwise ordinary-looking water babies be anywhere without the endorsement of a certain Royal Naval Commander Bond?)
Arguably, IWC was first on deck and – literally – by the side of its captain, in the 1930s. Two Portuguese wholesalers (though not sailors per se) had realised that a handheld chronometer would be handier strapped to the wrist, as per the wholesale switch happening on civvy street post WWI. Not to mention infinitely more readable, no matter how choppy or soggy it was on deck.
Back in 1939, the International
Watch Company of Schaffhausen on the Rhine made highly precise pocket watches, powered by hand-wound mechanics with gorgeous, swooping bridgework and oversized, pendulous balance wheels. In other words, perfectly poised to acquiesce to Messrs Rodrigues and Antonio Teixeira of Lisbon, and their local market’s noble seafaring reputation.
Paradoxically the first Reference 325, as IWC records denote, was delivered not to Portugal but instead to a Ukrainian watch wholesaler, L Schwarcz in Odessa, on 22nd February. The first proper Portugieser only arrived in Lisbon three years later –something watch-industry historians reckon had something to do with the rather inauspicious year of launch; Portugal having declared its neutrality during WWII.
Up to 1981, IWC sold just 690 Portugiesers. All cased in broad-faced stainless steel measuring an unheard-of 41.5mm across, not including its large crown, which offered extra purchase when winding-up the capacious spring barrel inside the pocket watch movement.
All of the above probably explains its low sales. But it also explains skyrocketing sales come 1993, when IWC’s genius boss, Günter Blümlein decided to mark his marque’s 125th anniversary by bringing it back to life.
Blümlein passed away on 1st October, 2001 aged only 58, and the mind boggles at what else he might have achieved if it wasn’t for such a tragic, early blow. Charismatic and well-loved, he was instrumental in the renaissance of the mechanical watch in highend guise following the quartz crisis of the 1970s and 80s. Sleeves rolled up, Blümlein invested in other names
‘Crucible’ is an overused word, as much as ‘icon’. But in the rarefied (oh, there’s another one) world of watches, the expansive cleanliness of IWC’s Portugieser lends itself every which way; especially the chronograph and all its necessarily legible counters
The movements powering every IWC watch are manufactured in-house at their historic home of Schaffhausen, by the Rhine river. Its torrents no longer power the ateliers’ lathes via paddles, racks and pinions but zerocarbon sustainability still comes to bear in adapting the 50-something, and genuinely iconic workhorse ‘Valjoux 7750’ movement of the 70s, with upped power reserve and column-wheel transmission sophistication; AKA ‘Calibre 69355’
1 The mainsprings of IWC’s self-winding automatics are still wound up via a clever pawlwinding mechanism dreamt up by technical director Albert Pellaton in the 50s. The closest you’ll get to perpetual motion, every time your wrist movement swings the internal rotor, two hooked arms nudge the toothed barrel encasing the mainspring, tooth by tooth
like Jaeger-LeCoultre and Germany’s A. Lange & Söhne, simultaneously preserving so many crafts on the cusp of extinction, through apprenticeships and training.
IWC’s most famous post-quartz rebirth was its military pilot heritage, articulated via the RAF’s standard-issue Mark 11 and, ahem, the Big Pilot bomber chronometer it made for the other side; Switzerland staying neutral along with Portugal, mind.
But in the Portuguese (renamed for anglophone collectors) Blümlein predicted not only the return of the mechanical, but the early-00s phenomenon of the oversize watch. Blümlein pipped to the post the era’s two other burgeoning beefcakes Panerai and Audemars Piguet with plus-42mm diameters, with historical provenance thrown in for good measure. Now under Richemont Group’s umbrella, IWC saw in the new millennium with an allnew Reference 5000 manually-wound movement, boasting a whopping seven days’ autonomy thanks to a return to authentic pocket-watch proportions. It might have been 1993 for the relaunch, but 2000 truly smashed a bottle of champagne, setting sail an ongoing flotilla of retro-engineered complications like 1995’s split-seconds chronograph stopwatch capable of timing two consecutive events, and a showboating tourbillon carrousel tumbling through a round dial window (ill-advised for actual showboating).
Thanks to the Portugieser’s timeless style appeal, not least modern watchmaking’s increasingly anti-obsolescent, ever-reparable technology, we’ll always have a connection to those salty seadogs of the 18th century… and a reminder of Britannia’s shorter-lived rule of the waves.
From Breguet’s first prototype in 1795 right up to the 80s, it’s reckoned that fewer than 1,000 tourbillons had ever been made. Today? That figure is more like 3,000 to 3,500 per year. And the spectrum couldn’t be broader, from a Chinese Seagull for £3,260 to a starting price of €300,000 at Greubel Forsey.
The tourbillon’s grip on the highest echelons is unyielding, and its fascination unwavering. Even the world-weariest of watch cognoscenti can’t help but be deflated by the sight, in a Bond Street window, of a lifeless tourbillon that hasn’t been wound that morning. Unlike almost every other complication, from the stopwatch chronograph to the always-correct perpetual calendar (yes, even on February 29th) the whirling-dervish tourbillon carriage serves little-to-no purpose in a wristwatch beyond the customer’s spectacle and the watchmaker’s prestige. Even a finicky chiming minute repeater can come in handy during a black-out.
A situation we’re perfectly happy about, however – even in our mindful, circumspect times: 360 degrees every minute, while continuing to tick-ticktick at 28,800 vibrations per hour.
This certainly wasn’t the case from the start. When ‘forefather of modern watchmaking’ Abraham-Louis Breguet first patented his tourbillon, or ‘whirlwind’ invention in 1801 it wasn’t to show off his virtuoso watchmaking skills, as the tourbillon does now –it was to address a genuine problem plaguing pocket watches at the time: being upright in one’s waistcoat for the majority of the day.
Watchmakers, even at that time, could, to a certain extent, regulate to compensate for the ‘squashing’ error caused by gravity acting down on the balance spring. But what couldn’t be
Mega Machines
Micro the mechanics may be, but a new generation of watchmakers are literally turning them on their head with ever-increasingly acrobatic ‘whirlwinds’ – or as the French would have it, ‘tourbillons’
ameliorated was the balance itself oscillating about its static staff, or ‘pinning point’ – a constant upright position and gravity’s downward force conspired to isolate the friction to a single point on the top side of the staff, wearing it asymmetrically.
By tumbling the whole escapement by 360 degrees every minute, the friction was spread around the whole pinning point. Plus, rather neatly, instead of having to finely adjust for eight positions (dial up, crown down, dial down, crown left, crown up, crown right, half-way position crown up, and half-way position crown down) a tourbillon need only be regulated for three positions; the two horizontal positions, dial up and down, and one vertical position. So if it’s pointless in today’s constantly up, down and all-around wristwatch format, why the unflagging fascination, let alone the astronomical pricetags?
“Without question, it’s the work and skill from the watchmaker,” says Stephen McGonigle, the Irishman who has made his name in Switzerland as a complications gun for hire, as well as one half of his and his brother John’s eponymous indie brand.
“Despite their similarity to a basic ‘time-only’ mechanism, the escapement components must be much smaller,” he explains, “and they’re constantly moving, so very tough to assemble and far more difficult to adjust. There’s also the decoration to consider and this is extremely involved, especially for the cage. When we were designing our McGonigle tourbillon, it was important for us to have the cage as light as possible – not just for aesthetic reasons but a light cage is also beneficial for the timing, reducing inertia.”
Since its migration to the wrist in
the 80s (Omega’s recent revelation aside – see ‘Alpha Omega’) the tourbillon’s biggest arms race of late has certainly been the multi-axial. After Anthony Randall’s double-axis carriage clock of 1980 it was then over 20 years before Germany’s precocious young Thomas Prescher unleashed a trio of single, double and triple tourbillon wristwatches in a single collector’s cabinet, followed by Jaeger-LeCoultre’s gyroscopic Gyrotourbillon, still in production.
J-LC’s latest, the Calibre 179, pirouettes within the historic marque’s flippable Reverso case, featured on these pages alongside four other newbies of particular note – Audemars Piguet, Bulgari, Hublot and Vacheron – all of whom (far from effortlessly) marry a sci-fi or steampunk aesthetic with horology most venerable complication.
The most prestigious exponents of the craft are happy to admit this is showboating in the extreme, the reason every caption comes suffixed with “£POA”… “Looking at their contribution to improved timekeeping,” says the Isle of Man’s horloger non-pareil Roger Smith, whose own tourbillon pocket watch convinced George Daniels to take him on as his only apprentice, “then I would say that there is no advantage.”
“Having said that,” Smith concedes, more romantically, “tourbillon making is very satisfying. Housing a fine escapement into a tiny lightweight cage which then has to continually accelerate and decelerate without affecting the performance of the escapement is an enjoyable challenge.”
“Tourbillons will always have a part to play in high-end watchmaking thanks to their mesmerising qualities and ability to showcase their maker’s skills to the wider world.” Amen to that.
AUDEMARS PIGUET
Royal Oak Flying Tourbillon Openworked
As one of the ‘Big Five’ manufactures, Audemars Piguet naturally boasts several tourbillons in its canon – most spectacularly in this year’s Royal Oak Flying Tourbillon Openworked. Conceived as always by AP’s Renaud & Papi skunkworks high up in the Jura Mountains, it’s not so much ‘openworked’ as floating in orbit above a sand-blasted mining base straight out of Dune.
HUBLOT MP-10 Tourbillon Weight Energy System Titanium
Do not adjust your sets: for once the price is listed, and we haven’t added a zero by accident. More to the point, it’s rather good value (if you can afford the thrice-yearly service bills). Young, agile, disruptive yet hardcore horologist Hublot and its MP-10 Tourbillon Weight Energy System Titanium may fall short in the nomenclature department, but never doubt the virtuoso execution of this wilfully divisive… watch?
No dial, hands or oscillating winding weight, instead a roller display, a circular power reserve and an inclined tourbillon wound by two linear ‘shuttle’ weights, shrouded by a biomorphic sapphire canopy. Definitely a watch, we think.
£238,000
JAEGER-LECOULTRE
Reverso Hybrid Artistic
Visually enthralling, as it tumbles about twin axes like an Apollo astronaut in zero-gravity training, the structure at the heart of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s new Reverso Hybrid Artistic perfectly justifies the ‘hybrid’ in the title. A total of 123 components: one ultra-light titanium cage and a peripheral carriage mounted on ball-bearings, each turning perpendicularly to each other at different speeds. The inner tourbillon cage rotates 360 degrees every 16 seconds and the peripheral carriage makes a full rotation once per minute. A ‘blued’ hemispherical balance spring beats at the eye of the storm, rather than the usual flat spiral, upping the planetary vibes. £POA
BULGARI
Octo Roma
Elizabeth Taylor’s go-to jeweller when in Rome, but also the most contemporary and design-forward haute watchmaker of our time. The LVMH legend of luxury’s recent and considered acquisition of ‘savoir faire’ in the form of various manufactures dotted about Switzerland mean you can pop into a Bulgari boutique and plump for a carbon-coated spaceship in miniature like this Octo Roma, as well as an emerald necklace. A flux capacitor of a flying tourbillon whirrs at the heart of a ‘Papillon’ display, butterflying its minutes display back and forth.
€130,000
VACHERON CONSTANTIN
Armillary Tourbillon
From Switzerland’s 269-yearsand-counting Vacheron Constantin, a money-can’t-buy one-off from their Les Cabinotiers atelier and its elite watchmakers’ ‘Récits de Voyages series. The Armillary Tourbillon’s bi-axial tourbillon construct is named after the concentrically spherical version of an orrery, developed in the 19th century for the Portuguese royal court. At the heart is a cylindrical (as opposed to J-LC’s spherical) balance spring, whose perfectly concentric ‘breathing’ ensures greater ‘isochronism’ (i.e. consistent precision).
£POA
“When Richard first approached me with his idea for a new watch brand, he showed me two photographs: one of an old Ferrari engine, and one of a new Formula 1 Renault engine. ‘In horology,’ he told me, ‘there has been no evolution like this for 30 years. I want my watch to be the Renault engine.’ He wanted 30 years of evolution in one watch!”
You can forgive Fabrice Deschanel for being daunted. Even as General Director of Audemars Piguet’s Renaud & Papi skunkworks (now heading-up another elite APRP ‘aluminati’, Greubel Forsey) the challenge Deschanel
faced in realising Richard Mille’s first ‘racing machine for the wrist’ was an enormous one, back in the late 90s.
For a start, the engine metaphor was no mere metaphor – Mille wanted his new watches built with a literal F1 philosophy: maximum performance, lightweight materials, zero compromise and even less due paid to the hoary old Swiss trade, still clambering back onto its knees after cheap quartz technology’s decimation during the 80s.
This was James Cameron’s Terminator to Merchant Ivory’s sepia and sentiment.
Form followed Mille’s intended function, but since it bore no resemblance to any preceding horological spec’, the resulting aesthetic – raw screwheads, matte sheen, exposed spaceframe bridgework, that hot-rod ‘tonneau’ chassis – instantly stood out. And it still does, even in smiley-face or candy-cane guise, with the brand’s wholesale migration from pit lanes to red carpets, rhymed in Pharrell lyrics (“She knows the time she sees the Richard Mille/Flat double skeletal tourbillon”) as mad-keenly as it is informed by engineering partnerships with the likes of McLaren and its bleeding-edge motorsport adventures in carbon.
Up close and personal, your immediate impression of a Richard Mille watch is the sheer depth. Which is a hangover from Mille’s original dealings with Deschanel: a highly limited run of ‘architectural’ tourbillon watches for the Parisian jeweller Mauboussin in the early 90s. And it’s here where things get a little complicated, and where the true, tangled nature of the Swiss watchmaking industry reveals itself.
Immediately after Mauboussin, Mille teamed-up with his friend Dominique Guenat at Montres Valgine, where consultation work for Baccarat and even Audemars Piguet paid the bills until the RM 001 tourbillon exploded onto the scene. Perched on the sleepy slopes of Les Breuleux, deep in the rolling Swiss Jura, think of Montres Valgine as Mille’s ‘thinktank’, pulling the strings behind the scenes, making an appearance only to stamp that italic ‘V’ on every caseback.
Not many people know it, but companies like Valgine are rife. They are project management consultants of sorts, working with brands on R&D and production planning, seeing a watch through from conception to delivery using a trusted base of suppliers like Soprod and Parmigiani’s elfin toy workshop, Vaucher. A family firm since 1900, it’s difficult to comprehend that every Richard Mille creation is conceived within Valgine’s bland stucco walls overlooking chalets, cows and misty meadows, rather than beaming ominously down from a Death Star in swirling dry ice.
Connected to Valgine by an elevated, glazed tunnel is Richard Mille’s dedicated ateliers. Despite spoiling the view for Guenat’s aunt and mother, who live in the apartment next door, it is an impressive building that does better in reflecting the sleek aesthetic of Mille’s watches – brushed titanium and carbon having always been the order of the day, over luxe watchmaking’s usual steel or gold.
“Originally, we worked with an architect to master the original three-dimensional concept behind
Mille Pour Heures
One Frenchman reinvented the luxury watch 25 years ago, as a full-bore racecar for the wrist… only, in the sole fashion Switzerland has ever known
1
2
1 Richard Mille conceived the ‘techno’ style of architectural mechanical watch in the late Nineties after his tenure at Parisian jeweller Mauboussin
2 For his eponymous debut – a sci-fi tourbillon suspended in a matte-black ‘chassis’ – Mille went with Mauboussin’s crack collaborator: the Swiss hothouse Renaud & Papi, owned by Audemars Piguet
Richard Mille; the coherence between the case and movement,” says Deschanel. “Achieving totality of these visual and mechanical traits, where everything is painted in the same brushstroke, is unusual in watches, as evolution of that harmony is difficult... a notable exception being perhaps Lange’s Datograph,” he admits.
The coherence of Richard Mille watches is often likened to that of a car’s chassis and engine, which goes to show how inspirational Mille’s Ferrari brief proved to be – even resulting in a Ferrari-branded watch,
RM UP-01, which blew Piaget, Bulgari and every other ultra-plat watchmaker out of the water with a 1.75mm-thin wafer of mechanics in 2021. No one but Richard Mille, and his innate coterie of clever clogs, saw that coming.
“I am into deep human relationships,” the self-confessed créateur tells 10:10 (Mille being a facilitator, rather than a trained watchmaker per se). “I work with people I love, and the only piece I am interested in is the one I’m working on. And it works; APRP is a rock‘n’roll place, very cool, very open-minded. We
scream, we fight, we kiss…!”
They’re inordinately expensive, but Monsieur Mille’s are watches made in a very expensive way. Take the discontinued RM008 tourbillon. It might have started at €344,000, but if, having re-mounted its finely regulated tourbillon cage for the umpteenth time, an APRP worker so much as nicks the mainplate’s PVD coating, the movement must come off, the plate goes into a capacious reject bin, and they start over. Given the entire split-seconds chronograph mechanism was developed from from scratch for four years, and that only one man – a former Thai kickboxing champion – Fernand Simao is capable of assembling the 15 kits sent to his home every year, it isn’t long before you appreciate just how much bang you’re getting for your buck.
The grandmaster of modern indie watchmaking, George Daniels
once advised fledgling apprentice Roger Smith that his watches must look “begotten, not made” –in other words, the watchmaker’s touch must be invisible. No more so is this apparent than with Mille. The watches are flawless and beguiling – proved by one recurrent phenomenon on 10 :10 ’s tour of the Jura. Upon entering every workshop in every atelier we visited, Richard Mille’s PR and our chaperone for the week, Theodore Diehl, was reluctantly obliged to remove his red-gold tourbillon GMT, which was then passed from bench to bench with palpable reverence; seasoned watchmakers gathered to examine the tiny machine.
It was a ritual made more pertinent by the fact that much of the audience was constructing identical movements at the time. Rarely do Mille’s suppliers have the opportunity to examine the end result of
2 Just when Bulgari and Piaget both thought they owned the ‘ultra-plat’ or ‘ultra-thin’ game, Richard Mille shocks everyone with a total switch from its ‘tonneau’ barrel case to a recordsmashing wafer of a tourbillon, co-branded with Ferrari
their toil, and their tangible glow of pride shows how well the final package works.
“An RM008 came back to AfterSales for a service recently,” Mille recalls with glee, “in an unbelievable condition. I don’t know what this guy did with his watch, but it was dented, scratched… filthy!
“Auction houses always say that the greatest attributes are variety, authenticity, quality, rarity – and with Richard Mille watches, all the elements are present and correct. But I am most proud that people actually wear my watches. The idea of my customers putting their watches away in a safe, or even worse a museum, is my worst nightmare – I love that they are ‘loved hard’.”
Running Fast
Land, sea, air… at whatever altitude, depth or turbulence you find yourself, centuries of horological honing (plus plenty of local opportunities to field-test) means Switzerland’s always got your back
This spring/summer’s 10:10 orbits the extreme contrasts of mechanical watchmaking, from sheer utility to performative, acrobatic mechanics. But there’s one constant to it all, and that’s the fact a watch (even an Apple Watch) will invariably be at the side of anyone ‘doing stuff’. Since it crept definitively from the pocket to the wrist in the trenches of WWI over a century ago, you can’t imagine a more indispensable accessory, regardless of the digital readout of your PC screen or every train-station sign.
The micron-tolerance system of rubber gasket rings and milled-out screws pioneered by Rolex in the 20s means we can always tell how much oxygen we have left in our SCUBA tanks, 50m below the waves. The ‘Incabloc’ pincer buffering the hair-thin axle of the central wheel ticking at four hertz means you can career down a rocky path on
two decidedly larger wheels and remain on time despite the delicate composure of 100-or-so bits inside.
Or what about Super-LumiNova strontium aluminate developed in the 30s by Japan’s Nemoto & Co, glowing brightly down whatever cave you’ve found; or Panerai’s own Florentine Luminor tritium paint glowing through the stencilled-out numerals of a sandwich dial. Even Edouard Heuer’s humble oscillating pinion of 1887 kept up with the encroaching age of speed, meaning instrumental proceedings could be brought directly into the car’s cockpit: a click of the start/stop pushbutton at ‘2 o’clock’ could start timing your lap (or, eventually, your return leg) straight off the grid, by instantly engaging your chronograph’s stopwatch module with the base time-keeping mechanics beneath.
WORDS Alex DoakROLEX
Technically, any Rolex Oyster sports watch is fit for purpose aboard any oceangoing vessel, whether treading the teak deck, champagne in hand, or reefing the mainsail in treacherous waters. This year’s rebooted Yacht-Master 42 is the professional go-to, however, with a ultra-bright Chromalight display beaming from a sleek, ultra-light and ultra-tough RLX titanium case.
£12,350
PANERAI
Panerai is a watch brand formed from a Rolex-mediated need to keep Italian crack frogmen on time during their covert war missions, so you needn’t doubt the abilities of the Luminor Quaranta BiTempo Luna Rossa PAM01404 – especially since it’s endorsed by the titular America’s Cup regatta team.
£8,300
TAG HEUER
Sixty years of genuinely iconic motorsport pedigree, distilled into bang-on-trend-green contemporary brilliance: the TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph in ‘DATO’ date-on-left guise, and on Ryan Gosling’s wrist right now. Say no more.
£6,000
CHOPARD
The haute joaillier of Cannes, Chopard might not be expected to also be in the business of something like the Alpine Eagle Cadence 8HF – but sure enough, outstripping even Zenith’s El Primero engine’s high frequency, a 57,600 vibrations-per-hour escapement sees you right (and left, then right again) down any slalom. £19,800
CERTINA
Certina’s DS SUPER PH1000M first surfaced in 1970, causing a sensation both above and below the water – purely down to that “1,000”: a full 1,000 metres of water resistance into the blue, if indeed any human body could take it. But, like the full-fathom counterpoint in mountaineering philosophy, that age-old adage applies: ‘because it’s there’. (Price-wise, it doesn’t get better value-wise, either.) £945
MONTBLANC
Paying tribute to the world’s highest peaks and the alpinists who dare to climb them enduring extreme conditions, the Montblanc 1858 Automatic Date 0 Oxygen The 8000 is housed in a 41mm stainless steel case totally devoid of oxygen. This has several advantages for explorers by eliminating fogging and preventing oxidization, thus allowing the movement to last far longer with greater precision.
£2,830
ZENITH
Zenith continues to lean into its privilege as the first and only watch brand licensed to mark its dials ‘PILOT’, and with form: precision movement as you’d expect, ticking precisely at an unwavering five hertz, where most others are four hertz, but also complete with period-correct (Bleriot wore one for his historic Channel crossing in 1909) oversized crown. £7,000
A New Beat
Louis Vuitton has drummed-up and reimagined its iconic Tambour as a super-luxe, sporty streamliner
PHOTOGRAPHY
Marloes Haarmans
IT SAYS A LOT about a watch launch that the conversation topic is not “how did you get Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender and Bradley Cooper in the same room?” But that was the case in July 2023 on the top floor of the Musee d’Orsay on a warm Parisian evening. The three A-listers were playing second fiddle to CEO Jean Arnault’s announcement that, after 22 years, it was time for a new Tambour.
“It has lived through many different life stages and was the only icon created in the 21st century,” he told press earlier that day, “but it is essential for us to make a change.” And what a change it was. Gone were the crazy complications – double compasses, spinning hour markers, and kaleidoscopic world timers. In its place was a sleek sports watch with integrated bracelet, slimmed down 40mm case, brand new movement by La Fabrique du Temps (Louis Vuitton’s hive of watchmaking talent) and a seriously elevated price tag. It wasn’t just the watch Arnault was overhauling, 80 per cent of the entry-level watches were to go, leaving just the Street Diver, the new Tambour and complications, he said, “to make way for the first step in positioning Louis Vuitton as a super high-end brand”.
Despite being ostensibly a sports watch with an integrated bracelet, there is so much to the new Tambour than first glances would discern. In fact, it is the epitome of quiet luxury – unless, of course, you opt for the rose or yellow-gold versions rather than the steel. There’s nothing quiet about those. Of all the components of this reimagined Tambour, it is the bracelet of which Arnault is most proud. And with good cause – so many integrated bracelet designs fall at this hurdle, creating something that doubles as a wrist-hair plucker. Not so here.
“We wanted to make sure it was second to none in terms of finishing and comfort,” he said. “There are no lugs, so it has a tight fit regardless of gender.” To achieve this, it is necessary to decrease the length of the links. This left two options: decrease in a small straight line or with a curve for the last five links. The latter option was more expensive but provided a better fit, so that was the only choice. It is decisions like that that define this new Tambour. Decisions that may cost more but provide a better watch.
Take the dial. It looks simple enough. Everything is beautifully proportioned, it’s elegant but then you look closer and realise every detail has been considered to give a depth and dimensionality to it. There are three different
types of finishing on it – sandblasting for the minute and hour rings, vertical brushing on the dial centre and snailing on the seconds sub dial – each distinct finish creating a reflective dial that behaves differently depending on the light. The Super-LumiNova-filled numerals are applied and given added depth and there is also virtually no bezel to speak of, giving a feeling of expansiveness, while the curved caseback ensures that 40mm doesn’t wear large on the wrist.
Flip it over and the attention to detail is even more evident. With La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton has unveiled more than one incredibly complex movement, but this is the first time it has had a proprietary threehand movement. Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, the two men who through La Fabrique du Temps and previously BNB Concepts are responsible for some of the watch world’s most creative complications, worked on it with Le Cercle des Horlogers, renowned movement specialists known for creating such complicated watches as Jacob & Co’s Astronomia Maestro Minute Repeater and CODE41’s Mecascape – a skeletonised travel clock thin enough to fit into a suit jacket’s inside pocket.
It is a thing of beauty. First there is the finishing – micro-sandblasting, perlage, polissage and the beautifully polished edges – that will now be the new standard on all future watches regardless of whether they are entry level or haute horlogerie. The micro-rotor is in 22-carat gold on which is engraved a repeating LV motif, while the openworked barrel cover references the brand’s monogram flower. And it’s not just a pretty face. It has a 50-hour power reserve and has a chronometer certified by the Geneva Chronometric Observatory, which insists on an accuracy of between -4s and +6s per day.
It could be argued that the horological world doesn’t need another integrated-bracelet watch, but the new Tambour does add something new to the conversation. It has a panache, and, like its ambassador Bradley Cooper, doesn’t take itself too seriously. I should know: after grumbling about celebrities at watch launches, my friend knowingly approached him at the Musée d’Orsay gala to request he took our photo. To which he graciously obliged.
Like the Tambour he was wearing, Cooper’s portrait of us both was perfectly framed, beautifully executed, and certainly not something many people can boast about owning.
Timing is Everything Cooking boils down to the minute, so it’s no wonder chefs love their watches (despite bacteriaridden leather straps and hinged bracelets being frowned-upon).
We teamed with Insta phenomenon @adip_food (fashion photographer Jesse Jenkins) to indulge: a perfect chicken burger, with seconds already on the side
PANERAI Luminor Due PAM01388 in steel on alligator strap £6,300
IWC Pilot’s Watch Performance Chronograph 41 Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team in steel on rubber strap £12,100
MONTBLANC
1858 Iced Sea in steel on rubber strap
£3,230
GRAND SEIKO
SBGJ275 Sport in steel on steel bracelet
£7,250
LONGINES Legend Diver 39mm in steel on synthetic strap £2,950
CHANEL J12 Flying Tourbillon in white ceramic on ceramic bracelet £POA
CARTIER
Américaine in steel on alligator leather
£5,950
NOMOS GLASHÜTTE Club Campus cream coral in steel on leather strap £1,300
Rolex Jesse’s own
Fremen O’Clock
“When Denis Villeneuve and his team reached out to us with the request to help them design a ‘desert watch’ for Dune: Part Two, this really underlined Hamilton’s standing as the watchmaker of filmmakers.”
Hamilton’s CEO, Vivian Stauffer isn’t wrong. Thanks to its Pennsylvanian roots, the now-Swiss-based watchmaker has enjoyed a historic presence in Hollywood, starring on over 500 wrists since 1932’s Shanghai Express (bearing a hidden photo of a character played by Marlene Dietrich in her breakout role).
It’s by no means mere costume. Hamilton actively worked alongside Dune: Part Two’s prop master, Doug Harlocker to summon a ‘wrist device’ from another world, guided by the sweeping lore of Frank Herbert’s sci-
ence fiction. Just as the watchmaker did for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) – also ticking across spacetime to the music of Hans Zimmer – and even for the notoriously demanding Stanley Kubrick on 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which Hamilton made a now-iconic metal cuff device.
The Desert Watch is, like the Fremen themselves, a hard-bitten and mysterious specimen, with an eye shot blue by planet Arrakis’ most valuable commodity, spice. And like Paul Atreides himself, it’s a collaboration loaded with destiny.
WORDS Alex Doak
