TenTen Issue 5 - Port Annual Watch Supplement

CARTIER A grande maison and its eighties icon, circling the square with ĂŠlan

Editor-In-Chief Dan Crowe Creative Director Astrid Stavro (Pentagram) Editor Alex Doak Fashion Director Mitchell Belk Accessories Editor Paulina Piipponen Sub-Editor Kerry Crowe Words Alex Doak, John Harris Dunning, Laura McCreddie-Doak photography

Tex Bishop, William Bunce, Adrien Dubost, George Harvey, Nhu Xuan Hua, Alexander Kent cover photography

Audemars Piguet by Alexander Kent Cartier Pasha by George Harvey Rado Captain Cook by Tex Bishop publishers

Dan Crowe, Matt Willey associate publisher

Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono advertising director

Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com contact

Port Magazine Vault 4 Somerset House London, wc2r 1la +44 (0)20 3119 3077 port-magazine.com

It’s difficult to decide whether it feels like only yesterday I was penning the last 1010 editor’s letter, or a lifetime ago; a sentiment being felt from all quarters, of course – as we ease from one form of discomfiting stasis, into something else entirely. However, there has been something reassuring in the study and proceeding documentation of 1010’s specialist subject matter.

The timeline of perpetual calendars, on page 12:31, was intended to be a celebration of 2020 being a leap year – and, yes, it has turned out to be a year we’d like to have leapt altogether, let alone just the extra day. But without reeling off yet another ‘hindsight is 20:20’ gag, the clearest lockdown recollection has to be that singular ‘groundhog day’ we respectively experienced for god knows how long. For me, that day’s one constant familiar was the Tissot Heritage 1973 chronograph gifted by my wife for my 40th last year.

It was the Tissot that ticked steadily and unfailingly on my wrist throughout; meting-out otherwise listless afternoons; guilting me into some sort of physical activity (jogging again, as it turns out); timing the precise rise on our Wednesday-night-pizza sourdough balls; proving to the child it was time to leave the bloody park.

As time contracted, expanded and just plain stagnated, the miniature wheels of my Tissot kept on turning. Mercifully, as the wheels of industry picked up too, the world’s watchmakers appear to have remained, responsibly, busy all along. Which is why it gives me such pleasure to showcase, over these pages, how Switzerland’s finest have been weathering all manner of global setbacks for hundreds of years, and how a fine wristwatch really is the most meaningful object you can own.

Alex Doak, Editor

illustration: christoph niemann

Editor’s Letter

Contents

Wingmen

3, 2, 1 Blast Off Wheels of Steel

Watchmaker’s Dozen

This Chiming Man

Wafer thin, Mint

Look After You Leap

Office Hours Photography: Adrien Dubost

All Aboard Words: Alex Doak Photography: Tex Bishop

Blank Canvas

Code Breakthrough Words: Alex Doak Photography: Alexander Kent

Eyes Wide Open Words: John Harris Dunning

A 2020 Vision Words: Laura McCreddie-Doak Photography: William Bunce

Circling the Square

Chrono Loco

Photography: George Harvey

Photography: Nhu Xuan Hua

Always Be Closing

3,2,1, Blast Off Every Omega geek’s favourite chronograph calibre has commenced re-entry in faithful ‘Moonwatch’ guise – now in collector-catnip stainless steel

There’s a photo used to illustrate the sheer human graft involved in shooting a pressurised dust-can to the moon and back: the Apollo programme’s lead software engineer, standing next to the towering stack of hand-written code required to guide Armstrong and co safely in a vehicle with less processing power than a Casio calculator.

Almost as extraordinary still are countless other photos depicting astronauts with a nasa-certified instrument strapped over their suit, powered and programmed by mechanical technology centuries more primitive than the era’s computers.

What’s more, the Speedmaster chronograph is still nasa-grade equipment – kit you can pick up from your friendly high-street Omega retailer, right now.

“With the exception of the Velcro straps used to fit around the outside of our

spacesuits,” writes last-man-on-themoon Gene Cernan, in the foreword of catalogue raisonné, Moonwatch Only, “the Speedmaster Professionals worn by the astronauts were not modified by nasa.

“It remained virtually unchanged throughout the entire Apollo programme,” the Apollo 17 veteran marvels. “No other piece of missionqualified equipment can make that claim.”

The Omega/nasa love story is a marketing dream – from Ed White’s historic spacewalk in ’65, over the blue expanse of Planet Earth, to Jack Swigert timing the critical 14-second thruster burn that safely re-entered the stricken Apollo 13 craft in 1970; all at the behest of their trusty Speedie.

It’s become such a cult that Omega recommenced manufacture of the

legendary Calibre 321 in time for Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary last year – the beautiful movement that walked the moon, before being upgraded to the rather more agricultural 861. Calibre 321 was a descendant of the mid-century’s golden age of classic, manually wound chronograph movements, distinguishing themselves by that jaunty Y-shaped wheel bridge, sitting proudly atop the mechanics – now admirable thanks to Omega’s use of a sapphire caseback.

In keeping with the third-generation model worn by Ed White, 2020’s Moonwatch 321 (£11,950) features a 39.7mm case in purist-friendly stainless steel, complete with the correct ‘Dot Over Ninety’ tachymeter calibration, circling the dial in black ceramic – sure to be catnip to collectors. omegawatches.com

These stripes tell a story.

Of a maverick. And a warrior.

And of a meeting of minds.

Introducing the Oris x Momotaro.

Made without compromise.

Made for the urban battle.

Oris x Momotaro

Wafer Thin, Mint Piaget has whittled the mechanical watch down to a 2mm-thin sliver, while Bulgari adds a sixth record-breaking weight watcher to its rostrum. Have we reached the limit?

Jean-Daniel Hofman might only have four 167-piece kits landing on his workbench per year, while his colleagues at Piaget’s Swiss atelier tussle with 407-part minute repeaters, but believe us, as the sole watchmaker capable of assembling the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, he has his work cut out.

While seemingly simple, in its paredback nature – and at 2mm in total height the Ultimate really is the ultimate – ultra-thin horology still counts as a ‘complication’, up there with tricky minute repeaters, tourbillons and chronographs. The component tolerances are agonisingly delicate at machining level, of course, but also when it comes to hand finishing the bits into shape.

Tweezers seem positively brutal as a tool.

Then there’s the task of ‘regulating’ or fine-tuning the tiny escapement, ticking away at the heart of every mechanical movement. The infinitesimal physics at play means any sort of precision demands a keen understanding of how energy flows from one wheel to the next, and a keener-still feel for how the balance wheel’s circumferential counterweights must be adjusted.

It’s been a house speciality since Valentin Piaget unveiled the 2mm-thin 9P movement back in 1957, cementing his brand as every lounge lizard’s go-to for slinky cocktail watches – the unanimous tuxedo timepiece, worn by the likes of Alain Delon and Salvador Dalí.

A movement as thick as a 1 euro coin is one thing – but an entire 2mm-thick watch?

Clearly something other than the alreadydiaphanous mechanics needed to be slimmed down.

In short, it is everything else: every principal chunk of infrastructure – movement baseplate, caseback, surrounding case ring and bezel – merged into one single disc of cnc-contoured cobalt alloy (one that stays rigid on the wrist). That balance wheel, instead of being suspended from a balance bridge, now ‘floats’ within a recess, oscillating on ball bearings. The winding crown, whose crown-shaped pinion usually meshes bulkily with a gear, now drives the barrel on a single plane via a worm gear.

What’s more, the crown itself is bar-shaped, stowing flush with the side of the case. (see side view, above).

It’s a breathless whisper of mechanical virtuosity that’s unlikely to be trumped any time soon – even by Roman jewellery titan Bulgari, whose own Swiss thinktank has often stolen Piaget’s ultra-thin march lately.

But that doesn’t bother Bulgari’s watch division md, Antoine Pin. Bragging rights to thinnest-ever watch may be fairly secure over at Piaget (there’s little, if anything, left to whittle down, after all), but since 2014, the suavely sculpted Octo Finissimo has ticked off six other world records nearly every year: thinnest manual tourbillon, thinnest chiming minute repeater, thinnest automatic watch (total height of 5.15mm, thanks to a winding rotor that spins about the periphery of the movement), thinnest automatic tourbillon, thinnest chronograph, and now, for 2020, the thinnest tourbillon chronograph (pictured left).

Surely Mr Pin can’t resist attempting to snatch Thinnest-Ever Watch?

“I’m not even going to say no on this!” he tells us, with a smile. “Of course, this is the beauty of competition. Piaget are pushing us, and of course we’d love to.

But you cannot step beyond the realms of horological performance; it’s not about doing something thinner for the sake of it if it doesn’t keep good time.

“Yes,” Pin concedes, “we are working on another ultra-thin calibre (and that’s all I’m going to tell you!), but no it won’t be a world record. And that’s OK. Because beyond the world records, it’s more about paving the way for more beautiful watch designs.”

An example he cites is another record that Bulgari broke this year: smallest-ever tourbillon. Quite something, given that a tourbillon tumbles the already-miniaturised balance assembly within a cage, 360 degrees every minute.

“Instead of just being a record though,” says Pin, “it’s all about pushing the boundaries design-wise. With the tourbillon case, we’re exploring what’s possible with highly technical but beautiful ladies’ watches.”

Given Piaget’s similarly chic line in feminine wristwear, it’ll be interesting to see what’s landing on Mr Hofman’s workbench next year.

Wingmen With parallel pedigree to Omega’s Speedmaster (see page 10:37), Breitling is a whole brand built on the stopwatch-function chronograph: inventing it (the two-push button format of 1923), making it (the b01 is entirely in-house), and kitting out those magnificent men in their flying machines. And at the very core of this high-altitude prowess lies Breitling’s Chronomat – a single-model saga that charts modern watchmaking itself, let alone just the chronograph 1942

1969

wwii raf pilots’ lives depended on their cockpit-mounted chronographs to work out fuel reserves, and the brand they depended on was Breitling, from the watchmaker’s Huit Aviation Division (‘huit’ referring to its instruments’ 8-day power reserve).

But it was another instrument that was to make the company famous during the war years: the original Chronomat, driven by (despite nomenclature) a non-automatic Venus movement, and unique for the mathematical slide rule circling its dial, whose two logarithmic scales came to define the Navitimer of 1952.

Cloaked in secrecy, with code names and meetings in back rooms, the Calibre 11 was an unprecedented project between two competing chronograph brands – Heuer and Breitling – together with two movement makers, Dubois Dépraz and Buren. It was the latter’s embedded microrotor that enabled a modular chronograph mechanism to be combined neatly with a self-winding wristwatch for the first time in history. Breitling’s launch line of six Chrono-Matics was among the stars of the Basel trade fair in 1969, in Chronomat as well as Navitimer guise – distinguished (like their Heuer cousins) by the crown being on the left side, nudged over from the right by aforementioned micro-rotor.

1994

Having entrenched itself in the blue-blood flying clubs of the ’80s, it was time for the Chronomat to switch to that other elite West Coast pursuit: yachting. Still stoically based on the Valjoux 7750 movement, and reviving the Rouleaux bar-link bracelet of 1983, a regatta countdown function was added to the mix, aiding skippers in the tense 10-minute countdown to a race, jostling for the line.

1984

With mechanical watches rendered practically obsolete by cheap East Asian quartz watches, Breitling defied all odds by reinventing itself on its 100th anniversary year with the publicly available Chronomat.

It was powered by the Valjoux 7750 automatic chronograph movement – a now-ubiquitous workhorse acquired by the Swatch Group shortly after its seemingly doomed inception 10 years prior. Reliable, precise and no-nonsense, the Chronomat first found favour with pilots, but its bold, luxurious aesthetic soon found favour with the wolves of Wall Street.

1983

circa 1991

The Italian air force’s Frecce Tricolori aerobatic team invited watchmakers to tender to create their official wristwatch, which absolutely had to be an analogue chronograph, in order to guarantee instant readability during tight manoeuvres – a format only available then in mechanical form, despite the era’s reign of electronic quartz. Breitling’s eager new custodian Ernest Schneider jumped at the opportunity, and his winning tender set the tone for the future of Breitling.

A collector’s dream, as the ‘Chronomat Renault f1 Team’ didn’t actually pay tribute to a specific team; at the time, the French carmaker was in the business of supplying engines to Williams. It was a partnership made in heaven, as, from 1989, Renault’s naturally aspirated v10s powered the British outfit to four drivers’ and five constructors’ championships (Adrian Newey’s aero design and Williams’ revolutionary traction control in concert with active suspension helped too, of course).

2009

2020

Like the Calibre 11 of the ’60s, the development of Breitling’s first purely in-house movement, the b01, began in July 2004 shrouded in the utmost secrecy.

With 100 per cent independence and future-proof adaptability in mind (given Swatch Group’s potential rationing of the 7750 workhorse), b01 was to be a movement geared towards chronometer precision, with an assembly line boasting the efficiency of blood-analysis labs.

Chronomat 01 was the first Breitling to house the cutting-edge result – so good, it’s also good enough for Rolex’s more affordable sibling, Tudor.

So here we are, nearly 40 years on – back in love with trusty, never-obsolete, soulful mechanicals, and back in love with outré ’80s details like the original Chronomat’s iconic Rouleaux steel-bar strap and rotating bezel with ‘rider tabs’ protecting the crystal. The highlight of the newly refreshed collection is an uncanny tribute to the 1983 Frecce Tricolori (with newfangled b01 mechanics, of course), but there’s also a bang-on-trend salmon dial too, just because.

Watchmakers’ Dozen “War, huh, yeah. What is it good for?” Well, Edwin Starr, watches, actually – as the recent sale of a complete ‘Dirty Dozen’ attests

1 2 1 Stamped on the steel caseback of every MoDspec ‘Watch. Wrist.

Waterproof.’ from wwii is that very abbreviation, plus the arrow that denotes Crown property.

2 All 12 ‘Dirty Dozen’ wwii watches sold by Fellows in August - one of just 20-odd complete sets in the world.

War has proved the notorious catalyst for most 20th-century technology, and, in World War II, with its newfound strategic air dominance, every Swiss, British, French, German and American watchmaker had the job of turning out better-than-ever, but also cheaper-than-ever military-issue wristwear.

As we know too well, Hitler had rather a head start on everyone else; his furtively gathering Luftwaffe was designing its ideal bomber-pilot watch as early as 1935. Dubbed the B-Uhr, this vast 55mm-wide instrument (‘watch’ seems myopic) came on an extralong leather strap that navigators would wind around their thigh. Regulated to the highest chronometer standards of the time, it would then be depended upon to plot an accurate course and blow the right things up.

The standard specification for the B-Uhr was farmed out to four German brands and one Swiss – A Lange & Söhne, Wempe, Laco, Stowa and iwc. Necessarily so, as the painstakingly precise manufacturing process meant production couldn’t simply be ramped up at a single factory. This was the case across the board, and in the case of the Allies it has given rise to the holy grail of ‘mil-spec’ watch collectables: the Dirty Dozen.

Towards the end of the war, Britain’s Ministry of Defence invited any watchmaker who could build a watch to its newly rigorous standards to throw their hat in the ring. All in, 12 manufacturers were accepted – Buren, Cyma, Eterna, Grana, Jaeger-LeCoultre,

Lemania, Longines, iwc, Omega, Record, Timor and Vertex – and in varying volumes they collectively produced about 145,000 examples of ‘Watch. Wrist. Waterproof.’, all black dialled, precise, rugged and easily readable. You can tell them apart from other wartimers by the ‘w.w.w.’ stamped on the back, above a broad arrow-shaped mark, mirrored on the dial – the traditional marking for Crown property.

By no means rare on an individual basis, but completing the set? Nigh-on impossible, no thanks to the likes of Grana producing less than 5,000 of its own w.w.w.s, in contrast to Omega’s 25,000. Nonetheless, Birmingham auctioneers Fellows managed the near-impossible in August and secured one of the world’s 20-odd complete sets, which ended up hammering for the bargain price of £27,000.

Post-war, raf pilots continued to benefit from lessons learned, in the shape of the most iconic mil-spec watch ever produced, the Mark 11 of 1948. It was produced by iwc as a follow-up to its w.w.w. – considered the finest of the Dirty Dozen.

If the Brits had known back then that iwc, in all its Swiss neutrality, had also been producing the Luftwaffe’s B-Uhr, the Mark 11 might never have happened. After all, it was very nearly the ‘Dirty Thirteen’, until Enicar was discovered to be supplying the enemy and summarily dismissed.

Look After You Leap Just before we locked down, lucky owners of a perpetual calendar enjoyed one of the most visceral reasons to invest in a fine mechanical timepiece – the midnight ‘kerchunk’ from February 28th to 29th: one scimitar-shaped lever dropping into the uniquely gauged indent of a gnarly, 48-notched cam, representing each month in a leap-year rotation 1762

1925

Like so many horological innovations, it fell to London genius Thomas Mudge to take leap years into account, with a mechanical calendar in watch form. You can witness his tour de force of 1764 with a pilgrimage to the British Museum’s clocks and watches gallery, or venture to the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva to admire the newly unearthed 1762 precursor, which the Swiss watchmaker (with a mean line in perpetuals itself ) bought at Sotheby’s for a frankly bargainous £62,500.

In any conversation about qps (quantième perpetuels), Patek Philippe is likely to come up first, thanks to its feverishly collectible lineage of greats. It was a 1864 women’s pendant watch whose same mechanism made its way into the first-ever qp wristwatch by 1925.

1978

1985

1996

The cal 2120/2800 – launched at the height of the ‘quartz crisis’, in 1978 – was, against all odds, what powered ap through the dark days when cheap East Asian technology decimated the traditional Swiss craft.

An ultra-thin 3.95mm movement, based (like so many since) on Jaeger-LeCoultre’s cal 2120 (which still holds the record as thinnest-ever full-rotor automatic), it was developed in secret and made in 7,300 examples over 15 years.

Heralding the resurgence of fine mechanical timepieces fit for the electronic age, living legend Kurt Klaus packed all qp adjustment functions into a single crown for iwc’s Da Vinci. A system still in use.

Ludwig Oechslin did the unthinkable a decade later with Ulysse Nardin’s 150th-anniversary Classic Perpetual Ludwig. Here was a qp that solved the complication’s biggest problem: You could adjust the date forward and back, using stacked programme gears instead of a big cam and lever.

1929

1941

1955

Four years later, the English-run incarnation of Abraham-Louis Breguet’s legendary marque claims ‘first purpose-built qp wristwatch’ bragging rights with its voluptuously shaped 2516 – its movement designed from scratch in wrist proportions.

Patek Philippe’s ref 1526 was the first serially produced qp wristwatch. The same year, a stopwatch chronograph was added to the calendrical mix for the first time.

The cradle of haute complications – AKA Vallée de Joux – saw the industrialisation of qps post-war. Audemars Piguet’s cal 5516, of 1955, was the first to feature a leap-year indicator (the white disc visible at 12 o’clock, above).

2015

2016

2019

Irish gun for hire, Stephen McDonnell, went one better than Oechslin for fantastical watchmaker mb&f, solving the qp’s other fickle foible of jamming during date changes. Instead of precariously defaulting to 31-day months and subtracting as necessary, McDonnell’s lm Perpetual defaults to 28 and adds as necessary.

Oechslin’s own ‘ochs und junior’ outfit blew everyone out of the water by devising a qp module (mounted on a Ulysse Nardin base) comprised of a mere nine components.

By comparison, Patek Philippe’s qp mechanisms hover around the 180part mark.

In terms of thinness, Audemars Piguet still rules the roost. The height of today’s 2120/2800 equivalent, calibre 5134, has been reduced 4.31mm by merging the teeth that count off individual days or months with the cam of 48. The Royal Oak UltraThin’s 2.89mm cal 5133 effectively turns a three-level movement into a singlestorey construct. Breathtakingly elegant watchmaking.

Back in the ’70s, a single designer made an indelible mark on the modern watchscape (as well as St Tropez’s dancefloors) by inventing the luxurious stainless-steel sports watch. Gérald Genta’s signature tropes of boldly geometric case, integrated bracelet and exposed screws remain as funkadelic as ever, with recent years seeing a flurry of releases all indebted to the enduring octagons that are Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak of 1972, or Patek Philippe’s shoulder-padded Nautilus

TEUTONIC MIGHT The austere perfectionist of East Germany has toughened up

This is arguably the most divisive (albeit understandable) luxury-watchmaking bid for the more youthful end of the market.

Alan Partridge would probably call it “sports casual”, but even he’d be choking on his pint of Director’s when told it’s not only an A Lange & Söhne in steel, but one you can take swimming.

East Germany’s venerable uhrmacher has always – justifiably – positioned itself up there with Patek Philippe, ever since Cartier and Montblanc-parent group Richemont revived the brand in cahoots with great-grandscion Water Lange back in the ’90s, once the Berlin Wall had fallen. A long-overdue shot in the arm after its hometown of Glashütte was bombed on the last day of World War II and the eventual gdr regime reduced all the local workshops to churning out cheap watches for an impoverished people.

But if Patek can have its Nautilus (yes, a Genta), then Lange can have this – a waterresistant monument to Teutonic poise and purpose bombastically dubbed ‘Odysseus’: still in keeping with the core catalogue’s austere dress pieces, still not out of place in Frankfurt Airport’s first-class lounge.

Rest assured, the mechanics inside continue to be executed exquisitely – hence that distinctly uncasual price tag of £24,900.

Large date displays, hand-engraved balance cocks and gold winding rotors take some nous, after all – and they are all in-house executed. But don’t overlook that 120-metre-water-resistant case, in three seamless, sculptural parts: a testament to Ferdinand Adolph Lange’s stoicism back in 1845, when he saw a future in a small, down-on-its-luck mining town. alange-soehne.com

FLY LIKE AN EAGLE Watchmaking’s blue-eyed boy of disco is back

Gérald Genta’s ’70s triptych – Nautilus, Royal Oak, plus iwc’s Ingenieur sl – is immortal, and more collectable than ever.

But come the ’80s, an era of disco glitz took off and Chopard’s St Moritz was perfectly timed, not to mention the perfect evolution of Genta’s unfashionable burliness – mirrored by two other 24-carat Wall Street darlings of the same time: Piaget’s Polo and the Cartier Santos.

After 77 years of building a solid global reputation for fine Swiss watchmaking, Louis-Ulysse Chopard’s son Paul moved the firm to Geneva, the capital of haute horlogerie and ground zero for Europe’s cosmopolitan elite. In 1963, grandson Paul André sought a buyer capable of perpetuating the brand’s rich heritage, since none of his sons wished to take over the company. This was when he met Karl Scheufele, descendant of a dynasty from Germany’s ‘gold city’, Pforzheim.

Under the Scheufele family, Chopard became a darling of the Euro jetset (daughter Caroline makes the red carpets of Cannes sparkle every year with Chopard jewels alone). But it was 22-year-old son Karl-Friedrich’s debut at the helm of the family’s watchmaking division in 1980 that revealed its potential as the connoisseur watchmaker we know now. Forty years later, he has revived his masterstroke, renaming the St Moritz as ‘Alpine Eagle’ and making Chopard once again attractive to the younger, edgier customer.

There’s a Chopard-made, self-winding chronometer movement inside; a singlechain bracelet of silky steel ingots and a sunburst dial as focused as an eagle’s iris: all for a relatively mere £8,770, we might add. chopard.com

TUNED-UP FINE TUNED Modern maestro Michel Parmigiani gets his racesuit on

Chopard may have been saved by the Scheufele family in the ’60s, and Lange

by Richemont in the ’90s, but Parmigiani Fleurier can claim pedigree newness non pareil – a Swiss luxury watch brand founded ground-up in 1996 by Michel Parmigiani in the sleepy village of Fleurier in Switzerland (next-door neighbour to Chopard).

Its inception was 20 years earlier, in 1976, when unassuming Michel started restoring watchmaking artefacts – principally those filling the family home of pharmaceutical giant Sandoz Foundation, who were to become the sole backers of his eponymous new brand. Benefitting from the heft of manufacturing arm Vaucher (part-owned by Hermès and invaluable supplier to those such as Richard Mille), Parmigiani Fleurier has ever since carved a niche pillared by its four Cs: classical, connoisseur, collectable yet contemporary.

A rare blend that could only be coined by a keen restorer’s eye.

All this makes the Tondagraph gt a rarer beast than ever – especially considering that the £16,080 price tag includes a chronograph function, crafted entirely under Vaucher’s roof.

Chronographs are commonplace, but paradoxically it’s a tricksy complication to tame, which is why many of the finest still defer to history’s handful of white-label suppliers or out-of-patent designs.

Thumbing through the catalogue (and maybe noticing that Prince Charles’s daily wearer is a Parmigiani), you might think the gt’s aesthetic coherence is as surprising as the brand’s venture into raciness in the first place. But recent history will serve you well: Parmigiani was the first to partner with a certain automotive revival in the ’90s by the name of. . . Bugatti. parmigiani.com

1 2 3 1 Previous spread The packaging might be out there for A Lange & Söhne, but the Odysseus’s hand-finished mechanical contents are still as refined as you’d expect.

2 Facing page The darling of the ’80s jetset that turned Chopard from wallflower to wildchild, the St Moritz is now ‘Alpine Eagle’.

3 This page Despite unusual raciness for such a gnomic dress-watchmaker, the Tondagraph GT could be what finally completes Parmigiani’s silver cabinet.

Patek Philippe may be the most famed and coveted of Switzerland’s grande maisons, but it has never done high drama.

Until now. . .

Words by Alex Doak

This time last year, when airports were bustling and facemasks were only for pollution, business travellers landing in Singapore couldn’t help but notice the vast hoardings in Changi’s arrivals hall; they heralded the opening of Patek Philippe’s travelling exhibition, Watch Art, at the city’s Sands Theatre. As with those who visited Chelsea’s Saatchi Gallery in 2015, they were treated to a greatesthits pop-up museum from Switzerland’s finest act in haute horlogerie.

The top-end collectors weren’t necessarily dropping by for the old stuff though. They only had eyes for that airport poster boy: one of six commemorative Patek Philippe newbies, typified by the expo’s scarlet colour scheme, with the same extraordinary drama you see here – an unprecedented flourish of open architecture, revealing the jaw-looseningly ornate micromechanics behind ref 5303’s minuterepeater chimes and tourbillon.

You see, Patek Philippe doesn’t usually do fancy – at least, not on the surface. Geneva’s favourite son is a notorious stickler for keeping every one of its rarefied tourbillons tucked behind the dial and only admirable through the caseback, limiting the delicate oils’ exposure to UV, they say; but more likely a knowing philosophy that, unlike

1

2

1 Previous page The Caliber r to 27 ps’s complicated works have been flipped back to front, to show off the minute-repeater’s snail cams, racks, hammers and gongs. To glimpse the rotating tourbillon cage at the back, the seconds dial mounted dial-side is rendered in clear crystal.

2 Left The ref 5303’s rose-gold case sports a wide, cambered and polished bezel, as well as white-gold inlays with foliage engravings gracing the caseband and the strap lugs.

flashier watchmakers, Patek has no need to show anything off. If you know, you know. And most people know.

With all 12 Singapore editions spoken for, a rose-gold ref 5303 is now part of Patek’s core catalogue, and it’s everything you’d expect and more, thanks to the lengths the watchmaker has gone to to expose the musical works and tumbling tourbillon cage.

Since it made its first pocket watch with a minute repeater (1845), Patek Philippe has established itself as one of the most gifted ‘listenable’ timekeepers.

In short, by sliding the notched lever running along the left-hand case band, the 5303’s two hammers at 9 o’clock will ring out the current hour, quarter of the hour, then remaining minutes, on two differently tuned ‘gongs’ encircling the movement. So at 3.18, for example, you’ll hear: Dong-dong-dong. Ding-dong.

Ding-ding-ding.

The transparency also applies to the tourbillon: The back side of its cage can be seen beneath the see-through seconds subdial at 6 o’clock. Which isn’t to detract from the usual drama that comes from turning a sapphire-casebacked Patek over.

With the 5303 there’s a fresh constellation of flawlessly hand-polished wheel axes, striped plates and filigreed steel flanges.

Price upon application

A placky quartz or ‘smart’ watch keeps better time, yes; but, perhaps that’s to miss the point. A well-made mechanical wristwatch not only keeps perfectly decent time for every one of our quotidian movements, it is one of the purest results of form following function – even when that form happens to be suspiciously beautiful.

Photography by Adrien Dubost, set design by Paulina Piipponen

previous page Hermès Arceau L’Heure de la Lune The night sky is mankind’s ultimate clock face, so it’s no surprise that it has featured on dials since we started supplementing the stars with mechanics. Here, genuine meteorite is inlaid with two mother-of-pearl moons, indicating the moon’s wax and wane in both hemispheres, as two orbiting subdials occlude and de-occlude every 28 days. £42,000 left Blancpain Villeret Ultraplate Date Just about as pared-back as a men’s dress watch gets. So where does your £16,200 investment go?

There’s the exquisitely machined and hand-polished rose-gold case for a start, guaranteeing 30 metres of water resistance. Then, a waferthin movement (like, 3.25mm thin), comprising 210 similarly delicate components, including an antimagnetic silicon balance spring ticking at its heart. £16,200 right Chopard LUC Quattro The Gotham-style hands and tuxedoblue dial are all very cool, but it’s the view from the back that really packs a punch; the ‘quattro’ of the title refers to Chopard’s renowned array of four stacked winding barrels, which add up to a full nine days of power. And don’t worry about forgetting to rewind – that’s what the steampunk gauge at 12 o’clock is for. £22,500

left Omega Constellation 41mm Master Chronometer The Constellation’s famous halfmoons, or ‘claws’, now clutch a full 41mm of sumptuously sculpted steel and Sedna gold, a rose gold unique to Omega for its resistance to fade.

The case is topped by a polished blue ceramic bezel with flawlessly smooth ceramic numeral inlays; all wrapping up the estimable Calibre 8900, resistant to all likely magnetism. . . even mri scans. £7,410 right Patek Philippe Nautilus Ref 5712G-001 When Switzerland’s most rarefied and classical watchmaker launched its first sports watch back in 1976, purists were understandably wary – just as they were when Audemars Piguet did the same four years prior. But luckily, Patek had the same designer, Gérald Genta on board and his striated TV screen with padded shoulders, aka Nautilus, is still de rigeur Riviera fare. £38,440

Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Control Memovox Timer The ‘watchmakers’ watchmaker’ of the Vallée de Joux has virtually every skill and complication you care to mention mastered entirely beneath its own roof. So when j-lc finds a new way with a legendary watch, we pay attention. Here, a small, t-shaped countdown timer has been added in the centre of its Memovox alarm, showing how long you have before the internal hammer strikes. Handy, and neatly done. £13,900

left Grand Seiko ‘Snowflake’ Spring Drive Japan is rightly proud of its biggest and best watchmaker, Seiko, and the feeling is definitely mutual, as this love letter to the slopes of Morioka attests. A sleepy skiing resort by winter, it’s also home to the elite Grand Seiko division, whose Spring Drive mechanism sweeps the hands here as smoothly as the dial texture alludes to the surrounding slopes. £5,400 right Rolex GMT-Master II Its steel ‘Pepsi dial’ cousin, with original blue-and-red colourway, continues to command the longest waiting list at authorised Rolex dealerships (a list that can be bypassed by paying 50 per cent over the odds on the pre-owned market). But make no mistake, this is a hugely desirable chunk of horological history: the world’s most elegant multi-time-zone pilot watch, boasting a generous dose of in-house-smelted Everose gold. £11,850

left Cartier Santos-Dumont A former 1010 cover star, we can’t get enough of this city slicker’s masterclass in dial design and case contouring. It’s wide, at 43mm (almost twice the size of Alberto Santos-Dumont’s 1904 original, commissioned to free up his hands at the controls of his flying machines), but the clever interplay of curves and industrial framework plants the watch on the wrist with great satisfaction. £3,550 right Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Self-Winding You’ll have to move fast to snap this one up, as only 20 alligator straps in ‘Harrods green’ have been assigned to Vacheron Constantin’s Traditionnelle, exclusive to the Knightsbridge emporium. As well as that gorgeous leather, complementing the case’s pink gold perfectly, the clear sapphire caseback reveals the classic vc calibre, 2455, painstakingly hand-finished to Poinçon de Genève standards. £27,200

Thirty years ago, legendary director Martin Scorsese set up The Film Foundation to preserve and share the works that inspired him to make his own masterpieces. Since then, this hugely ambitious project, which includes Rolex as its supporters, has expanded to encompass film traditions from all over the world – and is starting to influence the way we view the medium’s history. By John Harris Dunning

picture credit: all images courtesy of the film foundation

“Marty has a great love of cinema – and the desire to keep it alive for future generations. He’s working with incredible scholars to get this work done. He’s become a beacon in this area.” jeremy thomas

Previous page Robert De Niro in Raging Bull (1980) Left Björk in The Juniper Tree (1990)

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. That’s true of most of us – but not of Martin Scorsese. Part of the innovative New Hollywood wave of filmmakers that came to prominence in the ’70s, Scorsese and his contemporaries, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin still represent the pinnacle of what’s possible when fiercely independent auteur sensibilities are married to popular appeal. Together they changed the landscape of international cinema, sharing their uncompromising visions with international audiences.

Although these celluloid rebels expanded the possibilities of the medium by tearing up the rulebook, their mastery was firmly rooted in a deep knowledge of the past. Tellingly, Peter Bogdanovich had been an important film critic before stepping behind the camera. You have to know the rules to break them. . .

This reverence for the craft and history of filmmaking is integral to The Film Foundation.

Founded by Scorsese in 1990, the organisation seeks to preserve and restore films. The fact that Scorsese became so involved in preservation came as no surprise to Britain’s most important independent film producer and ex-chairman of the British Film Institute, Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Naked Lunch, Sexy Beast).

“Marty [Scorsese] has a great love of cinema – and the desire to keep it alive for future generations. He’s working with incredible scholars to get this work done. He’s become a beacon in this area.”

“We advocate and raise funds for film preservation and restoration projects,” explains Margaret Bodde, executive director of The Film Foundation. “That’s always been the core mission, and we’ve always hewed closely to that.” “And because we’ve been so specific

in the mission,” adds Jennifer Ahn, managing director, “it’s really streamlined not only our programmes, but also our fundraising, because there’s no ambiguity. We restore films, and then get them out to the public.”

The Film Foundation has worked closely with the British Film Institute since its inception, and was inspired by its history of dedication to the medium. “They’re one of the largest film archives in the world,” says Bodde. “When you hear Marty and the other directors talk about it, it’s with great awe, because they were one of the first institutions to have a systematic preservation programme. It was a model.”

The Film Foundation was born from Scorsese’s growing realisation of just how fragile the film medium really was. “In the 1970s he was living in Los Angeles and watching retrospectives of Hollywood’s Golden Age at repertory cinemas,” explains Bodde. “One day he was watching The Seven Year Itch, and when the image came up onscreen, the colour had faded.

The audience was yelling – this was an audience of diehard cineastes. It was a watershed moment for Marty, because he realised that this print – which was only 20 years old – and in this cinema, located in Hollywood, was disappearing before his eyes. These were the films that had fuelled his and his contemporaries’ creative visions.” Bodde continues: “The second key moment for him was during preparations to make Raging Bull in the late ’70s. He realised he didn’t want to make a film that was going to be fading in a few years. He enlisted his fellow filmmakers and started a campaign to encourage Kodak to accelerate the process of creating a more stable film stock so that their work would be around in 50 or 100 years, if the prints were properly cared for.”

Since its inception The Foundation has worked across a wide range of genres and territories, helping to restore and preserve

“Rolex really stand behind us, and truly celebrate the artist and the art they create. They look at the impact that they can have long-term, in terms of preservation and restoration and awareness – and how that impacts culture, both in the us and globally.

They know where our strengths lie. We are working towards the same goal.” jennifer ahn

over 850 films to date. The selection process is something of an organic process, utilising a network of cinephiles. “Our first step is working with our archival partners,” explains Ahn, “the Academy Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, the bfi, the Cineteca di Bologna, George Eastman Museum, Library of Congress, moma, National Film Preservation Foundation and ucla Film & Television Archive. They put together priority lists of titles that are in need, representing documentaries, feature films, avant-garde titles, shorts and silent films. It’s an ongoing collaboration.

Other times filmmakers or a member of our board will talk about something they haven’t been able to locate, and we’ll put on our detective hats. Then there are our studio partners who put up the funds for the restoration of a title, and Marty and members of our board will provide input and guidance during the restoration process. We have to be fluid, but we’re a small organisation, so we’re able to ebb and flow.” “Scorsese has an uncanny antenna for films in need,” adds Bodde. “Many filmmakers have an ongoing list of these in their heads, and we really rely on them to help guide us towards the areas where there might be a gap, or a potentially lost film that might need saving.”

What many people don’t appreciate in this digital age is quite how fragile early film stock really is. “Film itself is a special item,” explains producer Jeremy Thomas. “A film archive can’t be treated like a normal library. Film has to be shown. It needs to be kept in good condition.”

The cost of storing film has been another issue. “There was a lot of wilful destruction in the past,” says Thomas. “Thousands of film cans were dumped by studios in past years.

It was too expensive to store it properly, and they were a fire hazard.” A viable substitute for gunpowder, early nitrate film stock has

the potential to auto-ignite. Perhaps the most famous – and tragic – instances of this were the fires in the United States National Archive and Records Administration, and in George Eastman House, both in 1978. 12.6 million feet of newsreel footage burned in the national archive, and in the Eastman House inferno 329 films were irretrievably lost. The other threat is plain indifference. Like other forms of popular entertainment like gaming, comic books and television, for a long time films were considered too insignificant to archive seriously. It’s incredible to think that films starring the likes of silent-screen legend Louise Brooks, and even some of Alfred Hitchcock’s early films are no longer extant.

“We’ve just finished the restoration of a prerevolutionary Iranian film called Chess of the Wind that was feared lost,” says Bodde. “The original negative was found in Tehran in a thrift shop, and they got it out of the country and shipped it to Paris. It’s a revelation. It gives you a glimpse into an Iran that is gone.

It’s a great discovery. It’s an example of a film people thought was lost, and was then rediscovered. So they do turn up.”

The Film Foundation enjoys a particularly close relationship with their partner Rolex. “They share the same understanding of cinema and its impact on art, culture and history,” says Ahn. “Working in nonprofit for many years, you quickly learn to identify partners who genuinely share in your mission. Rolex really stand behind us, and truly celebrate the artist and the art they create. They look at the impact that they can have long-term, in terms of preservation and restoration and awareness – and how that impacts culture, both in the us and globally.

They know where our strengths lie. We are working towards the same goal.”

Restoring old films is a creative process

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1 Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann in The Red Shoes (1948) 2 Right Timité Bassori and Danielle Alloh in La Femme Au Couteau (1969)

demanding not only technical skill, but also a deep insight into and respect for the intentions of the filmmakers; it can be likened to working on the painting of an old master. “The goal with every restoration is to try to stay as close as possible to the original intention and look of the film,” says Bodde. “Sometimes that means a film will look better than it originally looked, but in an authentic way. An example of this is The Red Shoes, the Powell and Pressburger film.

It was our first fully digital restoration. Using digital technology and scanning the original negatives allowed us to give audiences the full experience of what the filmmakers originally intended for the colour. The film had also fallen victim to mould that was eating away at the emulsion of the negative, so a digital restoration was critical.”

Cecilia Cenciarelli, head of research and special projects at the Cineteca di Bologna, agrees on the delicacy of the restoration process. “We have our own laboratory – L’Immagine Ritrovata – exclusively devoted to film restoration. We try to have filmmakers and cinematographers with us when we do restorations, because you’re giving new life to a film. You have the ethical responsibility of conveying how a masterpiece looks, so restorations have to be handled with extreme care. We believe that technology is there to work for us, not the other way around.”

Cenciarelli continues: “Knowing the work of art in detail is the first step to even approaching touching a film. This is the core of our vision of film restoration. We started working with The Film Foundation restoring a number of Italian titles and discovered we share really deep in our dna a vision of what preservation and restoration means. When you talk to Marty about cinema, his enthusiasm is contagious.

It’s incredible when you meet him, and you realise this myth about his encyclopaedic

knowledge of film is actually true. He follows every restoration step by step – he even asks to see restoration tests while he’s shooting.

It’s a beautiful obsession. He has an incredible lucidity and clarity of mind – when he’s shooting a multi-million dollar film, he can just turn that off and talk about what grey meant in films from the Philippines in the ’70s.”

Preservation and restoration, although central to The Film Foundation, are only part of the story – looking forward is just as important to them as looking back. And that means sharing films with audiences. The Foundation has longstanding relationships with major film festivals around the world, including the Cannes, Venice and London film festivals, where restored films are regularly shown to the public, allowing them to re-enter the public imagination. This passion for sharing cinema with audiences is perhaps most effectively demonstrated by The Foundation’s educational initiative, The Story of Movies. “It grew out of our realisation that if young people don’t know about film history, why would they ever want to preserve it,” says Bodde. “You have to care about something to want to preserve it, and for it to survive into the future.”

In order to democratise the study of film, the programme is offered free to qualified us teachers and includes a wealth of modules covering the medium’s history. The Foundation believes in keeping the material relevant, and recent modules have been themed around civil rights, immigration and democracy. Determined to support diversity and explore and support forms of cinema largely unexplored by Western audiences, The Foundation created the African Film Heritage Project in 2017 with fepaci (the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers) – the continental

voice for African filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora – unesco and their longstanding partners, the Cineteca di Bologna.

“They came to us when they decided to specifically focus on Africa,” explains Tabue Nguma, programme specialist at unesco.

“When I met Mr Scorsese I realised he’s not just a great filmmaker, but also a fantastic thinker about film as a practice. He’s challenging the narrative of the West as the centre of everything. He has a real integrity, and an inclusive narrative about cinematic history.

It’s particularly important for Africans to rediscover these films, because most of them haven’t been seen by the younger generation – but these restorations are a gift to film lovers all over the world.”

“The history of African cinema has to be told by Africans,” says Aboubakar Sanogo of fepaci. “As a historian of African cinema I feel extremely strongly about that.

It’s actually the reason why fepaci was founded – it was founded on the basis of an absence. When African filmmakers in the early ’60s returned from film school in Canada and the us and France and the Soviet Union, they found themselves unable to show their films in Africa because the screens were dominated by Hollywood and other Western traditions. There was no infrastructure for the cinema they were creating, so they created fepaci as an institution that would work to encourage African governments and states and other stakeholders of cinema to create the wherewithal for a continent-wide film industry that would become a competitor of Hollywood.

This work involved all stages of the filmmaking process, from conception to consumption.

They wanted to create studios in Africa, a distribution network across the continent and movie theatres. The ambition was massive – it was just that the economic means was always

lacking. The idea of leading the charge for African cinema is in the dna of The PanAfrican Federation of Filmmakers.”

“The restoration and presentation of the films from our African Film Heritage Project is an act of political and cultural resistance,” states Cecilia Cenciarelli. “The fact that you can’t readily see these films and that many don’t know they even exist make the work very urgent. There have never been film laboratories in Africa to develop the filmmakers’ films. There has been a loss of sovereignty from the beginning. In Francophone Africa for instance, the Laval Decree, passed in 1934, meant Africans were legally barred from shooting film for many years. When they then got the technology, there was no way to develop it, and of course there were always huge financial constraints.

Even when you’re restoring classic African titles like Touki Bouki or La Noire de… you have to assume there won’t be elements in Africa, because the films weren’t developed in Africa. These films are often uncatalogued, languishing in deep storage as part of larger collections. This cinema doesn’t reside in their nations, but in their colonisers’ nation. It’s a dangerous position to be in.”

“We are trying to restore a number of African films that are a part of world film heritage, but the challenges we’re facing are immense,” adds Sanogo of fepaci. “Part of the problem of African film heritage is linked to the problem of colonisation. Africa was colonised by many countries, and so by default the films that African filmmakers made were often post-produced in the country that colonised them. So when we want to restore these films, we have to go back to these places and try to find these elements, and that’s not always easy. We have to deal with our dismembered cinematic memory,

the film explores the sexual hang-ups of a and not solely in the formerly colonised young intellectual living in the Ivory Coast. countries. There was also the Cold War axis Blending psychoanalysis with traditional of relationships with the former Soviet Union, African healing, it’s a sophisticated glimpse of Eastern Bloc Countries, Cuba and China, so you also have elements of African cinema there. modern Africa that Western audiences aren’t usually afforded. In this case, the filmmaker It’s very complicated.” himself worked closely with the team, and “Resurfacing this cinema is a critical act,” the restoration premiered last year at Burkina says Cenciarelli. “It implies you’re providing Faso’s Pan-African Film and Television Festival a framework to better understand what the of Ouagadougou. A project like this really hits colonial past has been – what heritage means. home how valuable this work is; not only does Being in control of your own image and voice is part of the liberation process. The reason any the restoration and circulation of this film inspire African and diaspora filmmakers, but form of racism exists stems from ignorance – it also allows filmmakers of other nationalities ignorance of history, of how things happened. to see beyond the banalities of the usual doom These films show us history very powerfully. porn broadcast about the African continent, When we decided we wanted to dive into and to question why more of this kind of African cinema with The Film Foundation, we content isn’t widely available. The challenge felt compelled to step back and have a network of course is to get international audiences. of African scholars and filmmakers tell us what to do, not the other way round. Otherwise “Appetite is fuelled by knowing the films,” says Bodde, “and that’s prompted by the merits of we’d be perpetuating the same model, even the films themselves. It’s all about providing if we were trying to do good. We’re incredibly access so that people can discover these films.” ignorant, but recognising that is the first The Foundation’s work in this arena step. You need to be led by those who made stretches beyond Africa. “We’ve been working the cinema, and those who are protecting and really closely with the Cineteca di Bologna in promoting it on the ground.”

These films confound international viewers’ developing restoration film schools as a part of our World Cinema Project,” says Bodde. expectations of African cinema; they’re not “We’ve supported film restoration schools in just significant cultural artefacts – they’re Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad, in also, perhaps more importantly, engaging India; we have a wonderful partnership with entertainment with a broad appeal. “The the Film Heritage Foundation there. Archives restored films are going to be revelations for are very scarce and underserved in certain audiences, because they historically didn’t get areas, because of the time and cost they wide distribution,” says Bodde. “Something require, and they’re really trying to create an like Muna Moto (dir. Jean-Pierre Dikonguéinfrastructure where they can archive Indian Pipa), which was made in Cameroon, is a cinema. We’ve also worked in Argentina, Chile good example – everything from the actors and Singapore.” to the story to the soundtrack are incredible.”

Unearthing neglected films is not limited Another example of the work they’re doing to the area of world cinema – there are plenty of is the beautiful restoration of director Timité examples of sidelined material closer to home.

Bassori’s La Femme au Couteau, considered “We’ve helped restore films that are now by many to be his masterpiece. Shot in 1969,

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1 Magaye Niang and Mareme Niang in Touki Bouki (1973) 2 Mbissine Thérèse Diop in La Noire de... (1966)

“When you talk to Marty about cinema, his enthusiasm is contagious. It’s incredible when you meet him, and you realise this myth about his encyclopaedic knowledge of film is actually true. He follows every restoration step by step – he even asks to see restoration tests while he’s shooting. It’s a beautiful obsession. He has an incredible lucidity and clarity of mind – when he’s shooting a multimillion dollar film, he can just turn that off and talk about what grey meant in films from the Philippines in the ’70s.” cecilia cenciarelli

recognised as landmark works by women,” says Bodde. “An example is Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970). It had a release back in the day, but it was really rescued from obscurity by the ucla Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation. It’s now revered in France and all over the world. Isabelle Huppert is a huge fan, and worked hard to get the film back in circulation. Some of these works have long journeys to get back out into the world, but they get there in the end,” Bodde explains. “Another example is Nietzchka Keene’s debut film The Juniper Tree, which was stored in an archive in Wisconsin; the advocacy of archivists and the support from The Film Foundation meant that it was restored and rediscovered. It was Björk’s first film. She’s amazing in it, but the revelation is the film itself. Keene has such a clear vision of what she’s doing. These discoveries do actually adjust the canon, restoring female filmmakers to their rightful places. They give audiences a fuller sense of film history.”

“It’s important for us as their partners to say happy 30th birthday to The Film Foundation,” says Aboubakar Sanogo. “If they didn’t exist, they’d have to be created.

The extent of the work that they’ve done in the space of just three decades, the kind of conversation their work has enabled between so many different cinematic traditions around the world is absolutely remarkable.

Especially considering that it’s largely a voluntary affair, driven by their passion for the moving image and a refusal to let it sink into oblivion. Here’s to their next 100 years of preserving cinematic memory in America, Europe, Africa and all around the world, so that this indispensable medium in which we’ve all consigned so much of our identities, dreams and aspirations will remain with us forever.”

In an exclusive conversation with legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, 1010 learns about the origins of The Film Foundation Have you always had this instinct to archive and preserve, or was it a realisation you came to later?

The realisation that films were fragile and that they needed to be preserved and protected hit me all at once at a screening of The Seven Year Itch, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1979, as part of a 20th Century Fox show curated by Ron Haver.

Ron was showing the studio’s prints for the show, and the picture was on a double bill with Niagara, which was a Technicolor print that looked stunning. After the break, Ron got up to introduce The Seven Year Itch, which was processed in Eastmancolor, and told us that it was faded and that they were going to try putting some filters over the lens to correct it. The audience cried, “No filters!” My friend and I were intrigued. And when the picture started, our hearts sank.

It sounded great, but the image was pink and blue; you couldn’t really read the actors’ eyes or their faces, and for all intents and purposes, the film was gone. We had seen some faded prints on television, but to see the Fox studio print on a big screen, looking like that. . . it really brought the issue home for me.

So, I got involved. I talked to filmmakers and to historians. And the more I learned, the more I understood that it came down to a question of value: What kind of value did the people who were making the films and who legally owned the films actually place on them? In the end, not so much. They seemed to be expendable, and, with rare exceptions, preservation simply wasn’t happening. I started a campaign for a more stable colour-film stock in the early ’80s, and then, in 1990, I started The Film Foundation with my fellow filmmakers and with the help of Bob Rosen at ucla.

The foundation has done some great work on the preservation of African cinema – how important do you consider helping preserve and promote lesser-known film traditions to be in the West? Do you believe there is an appetite for this material among Western audiences?

It’s immensely important to preserve African cinema, because filmmaking throughout the continent has been more prolific than in other areas of the world. In 2007, we started the World Cinema Project, a programme of The Film Foundation dedicated to the restoration, preservation and dissemination – very important – of pictures from areas of the world where filmmaking and film preservation were not prioritised for economic, cultural or political reasons – sometimes a combination of all three. Our very first restoration was Trances, from Morocco,

by Ahmed El-Maânouni, a documentary about the band Nass El Ghiwane, which had really inspired me. Since then, we’ve restored films from Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, Shadi AbdelSalam, Djibril Diop Mambéty and others.

As for the question of appetite, it’s not a productive way of looking at the situation. If we tried to follow the appetites of Western audiences when it comes to what we do or don’t restore or preserve, we would be relegated to big-budget English language movies made in the last three years. Appetite is never the question. Allowing people to discover films, giving them a chance to see something unlike anything they’re used to and react however they want to – that’s the heart of the matter, always.

I’ll quote Huub Bals, who founded the Rotterdam Film Festival: “I don’t find films for audiences; I find audiences for films.”

As for the question of appetite, it’s not a productive way of looking at the situation. If we tried to follow the appetites of Western audiences when it comes to what we do or don’t restore or preserve, we would be relegated to big budget English language movies made in the last three years. Appetite is never the question. Allowing people to discover films, giving them a chance to see something unlike anything

they’re used to and react however they want to – that’s the heart of the matter, always.

I’ll quote Huub Bals, who founded the Rotterdam Film Festival: “I don’t find films for audiences, I find audiences for films.”

Is the work that the foundation does today as relevant as it was when you founded it?

I don’t think it was ever a question of relevance, but urgent necessity, and neither the urgency nor the necessity has lessened at all since we started. The work is neverending, because there are always more films to find and to restore and to preserve.

And now, in the digital era, we are faced with a need to migrate the films from format to format, because the technology is constantly changing.

The archivists themselves are often uncelebrated – what are your thoughts on their work?

I’m inspired by their dedication. I have yet to meet an archivist who doesn’t absolutely love what she or he does. You have to. That’s why you go into the work.

For me, they’ve always brought to mind the medieval monks copying manuscripts by hand. I really admire them and the work they do.

How important is access, in terms of the work of the foundation?

It’s everything. A film is no good if you lock it away where no one can see it. By preserving and restoring films, they reach audiences anew and can be made available via streaming platforms, dvd, television and, most importantly, on big screens at film festivals, archives, museums and in the precious few remaining independent art houses.

What are your future ambitions for the organisation?

To restore, preserve and show more and more films!

time and motion To get the best sense of Martin Scorsese’s love for mechanics and timekeeping, don’t look to Taxi Driver, Goodfellas or any of his rightly lauded masterpieces – instead, watch his wide-eyed fantasy, Hugo (2011). A love letter to early French cinema, the protagonist is the son of a watchmaker and lives inside the clock mechanism at Montparnasse station. Seeing the joyful intricacy of his father’s automata and the swooping shots through whirring cogs, it’s no surprise Scorsese is a long-term Rolex ambassador. It’s a partnership that started with his involvement in the watchmaker’s Mentor and Protégé scheme (see below), continues with its support of his Film Foundation and is sealed with a kiss by Scorsese’s beloved ‘everyday wearer’: his Rolex Oyster Day-Date 40, in yellow gold (£29,350).

rolex mentor and protégé initiative With the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, Rolex supports emerging filmmakers through mentorship, contributing to culture by helping ensure the world’s artistic heritage is passed on.

Martin Scorsese and Alejandro G Iñárritu have both mentored protégés within this programme, established in 2002, which identifies gifted young artists in a variety of disciplines from all over the world and brings them together with artistic masters for a period of creative collaboration. Other mentors in film have included Alfonso Cuarón, Stephen Frears, Mira Nair, Zhang Yimou and film editor Walter Murch.

It’s time to feel the passion of Pasha once again – back from the ’80s, more rounded than ever, more Cartier than ever.

Photography by George Harvey

Pasha was a stone-cold bling-bling classic of the ’80s – rumoured to have its origins in the ’30s, when Cartier was presented with a technical challenge from a vip client: a watertight watch he could wear for his daily dips in the swimming pool.

The matter of water resistance in wristwatches was a hot topic at the time, as more and more people were wearing them, rather than sporting pocket watches tucked safely away from the elements. With typical form, the grande maison of Paris’s Rue de la Paix answered its client’s brief with an ingenious solution: a cap that screwed down onto the vulnerable winding crown, sealing it off. Additionally, with a touch of flair only

Cartier, the virtuoso jeweller, could muster, the cap was topped by a blue spinel gem (or cabochon) and attached to the case by a short, dainty gold chain link.

By 1985, the luxury-watch market was flooded (excuse the pun) with rather more fit-for-purpose swimming watches: Rolex, in a nutshell. But, nonetheless, it made sense to reinterpret a one-off number conceived in historic extravagance, at a time when indulgence was becoming the ’80s’ calling card.

Pumping up the Pasha’s outré forms to suit the ongoing craze for ‘sporty luxe’, with somewhat more of a disco vibe, Cartier preserved Monsieur Louis’s

original, squared-off Vendôme lugs of 1934 (named after the rectangular plaza of Parisian luxury retail), and, of course, the Pasha’s defining chain-linked cap.

The difference was in the size. In keeping with the era’s reputation for flex, the round case was enlarged to 38mm and made more bulbous on the wrist; plus, his signature knack for geometric interplay came to bear on the dial, with a square ‘railway track’ filigree lending tension to the big picture.

So what’s new for the rebooted Pasha of 2020? Are we even ready for a watch born of fecund times, designed with glamorous intermingling in mind? The truth of the

matter is that the Pasha of 2020 couldn’t feel more stately, or more composed.

Its extrovert lines have been smoothed to contemporary tastes, the build of its movement and instant strap switchability each lending real-world, always-on versatility.

Four fittingly ornate Arabic numerals bolster Cartier’s modern tendency toward the oversized, while the bracelet’s pattern is accentuated by the mesmeric clous de Paris dial engravings. Initially targeted at the men of boardrooms and corner offices, the Pasha of the ’80s was quickly adopted

by Wall Street women and Long Island ladies for the power it exuded. Hence, the

new Pasha doesn’t stop at the screw-down cap when it comes to Cartier’s crowning blue ‘cabochon’ jewel: They’ve added another one inside, Russian-doll style, to the winding crown itself. Stealth wealth and ‘If you know, you know’ insider detailing, in other words.

Said crown is your sole interface with the mechanical movement ticking away inside – Pasha’s other big switch-up for 2020. Admirable through the clear sapphire caseback is Cartier’s own in-housemanufactured 1847 mc calibre, guaranteeing peace of mind thanks to its resistance to magnetism (magnetism being the mechanical watch’s biggest enemy in our neodymium battery-powered world of smart

devices). The ‘escapement’ – where the flow of energy through the watch’s mechanics is eked out, tick for the tock – is made from inert nickel phosphorous. Meanwhile, a paramagnetic alloy is integrated into the case.

In steel or gold bracelet, or alligator leather, all straps can be interchanged thanks to the Cartier-developed QuickSwitch system.

Then there’s the ability to personalise the secret patch of case hidden beneath the crown cap’s lever with your own initials: adding further gratification and connection every time you interact with your talisman.

While its watches have always been about throwing innovative shapes, the redux Pasha sees Cartier in better shape than ever.

ALL

ABOARD

Diving watches are going back to the future with a flotilla of revival water babies, as cool and fit for purpose as they were 50 years ago – and Rado’s Captain Cook is at the helm. Photography by Tex Bishop

After five rather startling years of slowdown (since reversed, it should be said), you can forgive Switzerland’s watchmakers for hunkering down to trend-led facelifts and subtle tweaks – rather than the bombastic, r&d-budgetdraining mechanical wizardry of the noughties.

While the newness may only be casethick, the impact of this more considered approach has been delightful. Indeed, the facelifts of 2020 have amounted to a veritable pick ’n’ mix of exuberant colour pops, from regal blue to acid-house yellow and camo green.

One particular colour, however, is a distinct rose tint – soundtracked to the creak of archives being pulled open and raided, to instantly satisfying effect. Just as with all the nostalgic advertising and ‘Keep Calm’ tea towels the uk is still suffering following the financial crash (no doubt drawn out by Brexit), this year’s tentative stream of launches feature vintage reissues and retro throwbacks by the boatload – the biggest of all being the diving watch.

Despite rarely encountering actual saltwater, the water-resistant tool watch’s ubiquity on civvy street is for good reason: It looks purposeful yet distinguished, with a broad canvas for bold design.

And whether you’re padi level 3 or just splashing about in the shallow end with the kids, they’re genuinely practical – not forgetting resistant to magnetism, as well as water, thanks to their chunky metal cases.

In other words. . . you can throw on a diving watch and forget about it. It’s how Sean Connery’s Rolex so believably transitioned from planting a bomb underwater to propping up a cocktail bar within just a few minutes. (Or, rather less believably, how Pierce Brosnan’s Omega went from laser-cutting a nuclear train to driving a tank.) It’s also how your diving watch embodies as many real-life tales of derring-do as the green-enamelled wings adorning your silver bonnet: proving itself on the professional circuit lends your prize purchase an array of talking points.

For a start, while born of the murky depths, it was something far murkier that provoked any notion of watertightness in the first place: the trenches of World War I. Those ghastly conditions meant the gentleman’s watch migrated from the pocket to the wrist – a hands-free convenience that nonetheless kept it permanently exposed to the elements, rather than tucked safely away in your waistcoat. Dust and moisture entered far more readily through gaps in the case, and especially the watch’s Achilles’ heel: the winding/setting crown.

Thanks to a certain aforementioned brand, the new sports-watch genre began

screwing the crown – as well as the case’s back and front – tightly onto the central case body, like a submarine hatch. Throw in the later addition of rubber O-ring gaskets sealing every join, and you have the system in use to this day, across the board.

By the ’50s, war had honed ‘selfcontained breathing apparatus’, or scuba, and thanks to the popular films of Jacques Cousteau, the public were throwing themselves (or rather, falling backwards) into this exciting new amateur sport. Which meant, for watchmakers, the floodgates opened: Every Swiss manufacturer and a good few American ones soon boasted a diving watch in their collections. It helped that the bright details and voluptuous forms lent themselves particularly groovily to the styles of the ’60s and ’70s.

Given our unquenched thirst for all things retro (especially mid-century retro), not to mention backstories aplenty, our current spate of reissued vintage diving watches is hardly surprising. Which brings us to Rado.

A burgeoning reputation for sci-fi experimentalism in materials science, and by the same token design, meant that Rado’s Captain Cook divers of the early ’60s stole a march on more famous releases, in terms of bulbous case shapes and far-out colourways: a long-ignored prescience that Rado is now redressing with another stellar 2020 reissue, dating from 1962. Moreover, given this expertise in tungsten-carbide hardmetals, followed by pioneering, precision-engineered ceramic, it’s particularly charming to see Rado diving back into the scuba scene with a watch made of maritime’s most historic metal: bronze.

The anti-corrosiveness of aluminiumspiked copper (‘cual’, used here for the case as well as the crown and bezel) still makes it the alloy of choice for ship’s propellers, and its rough-hewn heft and warmth means bronze is flattering on any wrist. Tech-heads needn’t fear however, as Rado couldn’t resist inlaying the bezel with top-grade green ceramic, whose numerals are then laser etched.

It’s not just the maritime connection per se, or the brooding brown-gold tonality that sells this watch; it is the patina that develops in reaction to external agents such as air, moisture, heat and friction. This green-grey ‘crust’ isn’t corrosion – on the contrary. It is the bronze’s ‘skin’, a protective layer that slows down any further oxidation of the metal. And because it develops haphazardly, in accordance with your lifestyle, your place on the planet, how much you wear it, etc. . . your Rado’s patina is totally unique.

Uniqueness is a priceless usp in the luxury-watch world – as well as authenticity – and in this case the good captain has both firmly anchored.

Dive on in, the water’s fine.

Twenty years since launching to slack-jawed fashion and watch press alike, Chanel has remodelled its J12 for the 21st century. Allow Laura McCreddie-Doak to wind things back and see what’s next.

Photography by William Bunce.

Set design by Paulina Piipponen

Previous page: Chanel’s J12 Phantom in white ceramic and steel, boasting a Kenissi manufacture automatic movement, developed

by Tudor (£5,500).

Left: Being Chanel, the j12 (black ceramic model pictured opposite, £5,400) doesn’t want for high-profile modelling opportunities.

If you know about watches or storied French fashion houses, chances are you’ll know the name Jacques Helleu. Even if the name still doesn’t sound familiar, his work certainly will be.

During his 40 years as artistic director for Chanel he honed the image of the ailing maison, aligning its trajectory towards becoming the powerhouse it is today. He was the man who, in 1968, revitalised the reputation of Chanel No 5 by putting Catherine Deneuve in a dinner suit; made Nicole Kidman dance on Parisian rooftops, directed by Baz Luhrmann; and turned Vanessa Paradis into a bird in a cage.

He also invented the j12 watch.

At the time, Helleu was communications director of both the watch and jewellery departments. His starting point, for a project that would take seven years and reinvent the sports watch entirely, was himself. Chanel was a firmly female fashion house. Its codes and iconography were all derived from its formidable founder; there was nothing masculine on which Helleu could base his designs. So he looked to the two areas that interested him – cars and boats.

Nautical speedometers were a starting

point for the bezel; he was also drawn to a particular all-black j-Class superyacht called Stealth, designed by Italian industrial Giovanni Agnelli, plus the j-Class 12-metre yachts that competed in races such as the Americas Cup (the watch’s namesake, if you hadn’t already guessed).

The seven-year time frame was caused by the material. Helleu wanted it to be black, scratch and oxidisation proof and with a hardness close to that of diamond. In other words, ceramic: a notoriously hard material to tame within the tolerances demanded by a water-resistant watch case.

The only successful proponent thus far had been Rado, whose technology was definitively ring-fenced by parent group Swatch. Therefore, it fell to Chanel’s proprietary Swiss component makers g&f Châtelain to innovate on their own. And boy did they deliver. j12 was launched in 2000, adorned head to toe in the maison’s trademark black.

Chic yet practical, here was a fine-jewellery sports watch made from ceramic that was good to 200m beneath the waves. Perfect for strolling the deck of a Monaco superyacht or the dancefloor of Paris’s Le Jeune.

Although designed originally as a man’s

watch, the vogue for women wearing oversized watches meant the j12 became a regular fixture on the wrists of insouciant supers. True to form, a 38mm j12 was launched three years later, in pure-white ceramic – another technical triumph that led Chanel to proudly rebrand g&f Châtelain in its own name.

Keen to appeal to men who might not want to share their watches anymore, in 2007 Chanel launched the ultra-masculine 41mm J12 Superleggera – a brooding chronograph hybridised with titanium, bearing the same italic typography of Italy’s famed ‘super-light’ coachbuilder as the bonnet of every Aston Martin db5.

Over the last 20 years, the J12 has housed a flying tourbillon (thanks to relations with Audemars Piguet’s complications skunkworks), been paved with diamonds – even featured Mademoiselle herself with arms as hands, a la Mickey Mouse.

For the start of its 20th birthday celebrations, in typical Chanel style, the watchmaking studio decided to take a more low-key approach. It tasked its watchcreation studio director, Arnaud Chastaingt, with subtly reinventing the icon for the 21st century.

Right: The j12 Paradoxe (£7,000) is a twofaced slice of genius.

The sliver of black isn’t simply cosmetic, it’s actually solid ceramic fused to the white ceramic, yet maintaining its water resistance.

“I have a very special relationship with this watch; it has always fascinated and inspired me,” explains Chastaingt, who has been a fan of the j12 since his days as a design student. “It has never lost its edginess, and it has made a mark as one of Chanel’s most iconic creations. It has now become my muse. I made sure it celebrated its 20th birthday in style.”

Like any diva worth her title, the j12 had two birthdays. Last year, Chanel introduced the refined form of the j12 2.0. The changes were subtle – 40 notches on the bezel instead of 30, redesigned numerals and indices, a reduced crown, indicators on the railway track and, to the delight of watch connoisseurs, a brand-new movement from Kenissi Manufacture – the industrial arm of Tudor, in which Chanel acquired a 20 per cent stake in the January.

This year, Mlle j12 had her second 20th birthday, and this time she put on the ritz.

Chastaingt’s inspiration was Coco Chanel’s words: “Black has it all, so does white. Their beauty is absolute. It’s the perfect harmony.” He took that harmony literally and created the j12 Paradoxe, with a case in all-white ceramic, apart from a slice of black down its right side.

“For 20 years, the j12 would basically be either black or white,” says Chastaingt. “In 2020, I am fusing both colours together in the same creation. From a watchmaker’s perspective, the J12 Paradoxe is a new twist on the graphic two-tone [or ‘bimetal’] concept in watchmaking. But here, the marriage of gold and steel is replaced with a combination of black and white ceramic.

“Most importantly, though, the twotone concept is also a signature, a graphic hallmark that is cherished at Chanel.”

This amazing aesthetic effect was achieved by cutting and fusing two ceramic cases of different dimensions to form one casing. What’s more, if all-ceramic seems too pedestrian, there’s also an haute joaillerie option that’s black with a slice of diamonds instead.

Even more impressive is the j12 X-Ray. As the name suggests, you can see right through, because this is an all-sapphire watch. Everything apart from the hands, mainspring, train wheels and some components that have to be metal in order to function are made from sapphire crystal.

“It’s bespoke, a study in haute couture, made according to the rules of haute horlogerie,” explains Chastaingt. “The

mounting bridge and gear bridge are in sapphire to allow the light to come in. This transparency reveals the watchmaking latticework, with flawless finishing.”

Chanel has certainly proved itself to have a unique take on what ‘haute horlogerie’ means, something that is driven by Chastaingt’s refusal to adhere to any notion of watchmaking tradition other than the ones set by the maison itself.

“To begin with, I didn’t really like the term ‘complication’,” he admits. “I never understand watches that require you to have an engineering degree to tell the time. If Gabrielle Chanel were alive today, she would probably reject such creations. She believed that simplicity and comfort were a guiding philosophy.

“In 2013, the year I joined the house, Chanel completely brought me to terms with that philosophy. Chanel has a very idiosyncratic definition of haute horlogerie.”

If that idiosyncrasy continues to produce watches with half of the creativity and panache of the latest crop of J12s, Chanel can continue to define haute horlogerie any way it likes.

It seems Jacques Helleu’s original vision remains 2020 in every sense.

r ere’s a place fo th r e th e h w r gs ove pieces in our e m ti l a ic n A question han a h c nd-crafted me the point traditionally ha universe, but that’s precisely ed that will digitally entwin m is a defiance of everything nis Hua – their anachro lete. Photography by Nhu Xuan bso eventually be o

first page tag Heuer Carrera Sport Chronograph in steel £5,500 second page Chanel j12 Phantom in ceramic and steel £5,500

above Audemars Piguet (Re)Master01 Selfwinding Chronograph in steel and pink gold £51,800 right iwc Portugieser Yacht Club Chronograph in steel £11,600

above Hublot Big Bang Sang Bleu II Blue Pavé in titanium £36,500 left Breguet Classique Tourbillon Extra-Plat Automatique in platinum £140,500

above Tudor Black Bay in steel £2,840 right Bvlgari Bvlgari Cities Special Edition, Roma in carbon-coated steel £3,810

left Breitling Superocean Heritage ’57 in steel £3,400 below Rado True Square Open Heart Automatic in ceramic £2,090

credits Photography: Nhu Xuan Hua Photography assistant: Karolina Burlikowska Set design: Paulina Piipponen Styling: Rudy Simba Betty Hand models: Paul Darnell Davis Thomas, Malcolm Yaeng, Piotr Jarosz

It says everything that the printing industry’s specialist ink supplier yields reams of column inches every December, when Pantone Colour of the Year is announced. This year’s is Classic Blue, and it was Living Coral in 2019; in other words, cool orange wash followed by maximalist cyan velvet – both dictated by you, them and everyone else on Instagram who fancies themselves as an interior designer. A hypercoloured trend for good that is being mirrored throughout the Jura Mountains – manifest as Swiss watchmaking’s new technological and creative frontier

INTO THE GREEN

Yup, luxury wristwatches are finally going with the colour flow after centuries of monochrome dials, shiny metals and little more than a red-tipped second hand as the maximum of flair.

Switzerland’s hills are alive with the sound of colour experimentation; but as you’d expect from the boffins at the helm – very much in the business of super-engineering things, as antidote to the alternative, decidedly colder ‘wearable tech’ – it’s via innovation in materials science and precision machining, as never seen before.

The trend is also unleashing an artistry in one of watchmaking’s most technical but overlooked trades: dial making. Whether you call it ombré (shadow), fumé (smoked) or simply ‘gradient’, it’s all about coloured dials right now, which either darken outwards or inwards to create a sense of depth and mystery. The fabrication technique involves spraying the shadow onto a rotating dial that’s already been coloured, producing results that can be incredibly varied according to the speed of rotation of the dial, plus the power of the spray.

With $1,000 earmarked, per watch, towards protecting the hammerhead shark of French Polynesia, Blancpain’s Mokarran edition of its Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe diving watch alludes to the endangered creatures’ eerie shallows with a green dial rendered in tropical sunburst – another fumé synonym, named after the eminently auctionable vintage sports dials that have faded after decades of sun worship.

Over 60 years ago, Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms was a pioneer in military sub-aqua manoeuvres, thanks to its invention of the rotating timing bezel.

Today, what’s even more gratifying than its endurance is its newfound worthy purpose.

Blancpain’s enviable bid to conserve the hammerhead shark

1

2 1 The ceramic-cased Mokarran (£12,900) joins an enviable club of green-eyed sea monsters this year.

2 Zirconium-oxide ‘feedstock’ for Rado’s high-tech ceramic.

Pigments are added before high-pressure moulding, then hightemperature sintering.

SILICATE VALLEY Blue is the warmest colour. Like, 900º warm

Ceramic. It’s now ubiquitous across the board in guises of varying pedigree: a spectrum indisputably topped by Rado and Chanel – both of whom boast cutting-edge, pioneering manufacturing facilities of their own. Ceramic has been Rado’s stock in trade since the ’80s, in progressively slimmer, tougher and more alchemical iterations. How it manages to render porcelain granules in such ethereal shades to the sort of tolerances demanded by a watertight watch case at 900 degrees is anyone’s guess.

Ceramic may be hypoallergenic and scratch-resistant but it’s the intensity of colour that primarily makes it desirable... if you can colour it in the first place.

Which makes Certina’s heart-poundingly desirable and slack-jaw-inducingly affordable ds ph200m (£835), not only a hot prospect, but an authentic one, as the historic sports brand is a stablemate of Rado at Swatch Group, and therefore has in-house access to its ceramic skunkworks – aka Comadur.

The navy-blue rotating-bezel crowns in ceramic are not only a handsome tribute to the ’60s’ diving watches demanded by scuba’s early hobbyists, but a mechanical timekeeper fit for 2021, being fitted with another nifty bit of material science: the Nivachron balance spring. Its steady 4hz tick at the heart of the movement isn’t affected by all the magnets in our modern world of tech, because it’s based on titanium rather than iron.

1

1 Your £835 gets a whole lot of tick for your tock when it comes to Certina’s new diver, with a Rado-spec ceramic bezel and antimagnetic Nivachron balance spring.

ALL FIRED UP A Minerva that comes oven-fresh, courtesy Montblanc

Back in the 17th century, if ornately engraved gold casework wasn’t enough, your bling-bling got its colour from one craft only.

To be fair, enamelling and dial-enamellers’ skills have always been a rare commodity, which makes Montblanc’s modernday approach innovative in its own right.

Germany’s top pen maker harbours two formidable Swiss watchmaking facilities – one an art nouveau Le Locle atelier assembling solid entry-level luxury fare, the other making a preserved-in-aspic legend of precision timekeeping, the Minerva.

The latter was all but on the scrapheap until Montblanc swooped in to the rescue in the mid-’00s, preserving the Villeret workshops full of priceless antique machinery. As well as the gorgeously hand-finished mechanics (admirable rearside), the classic Minerva style continues to be channelled dialside (albeit under the confusingly named 1858 umbrella, demarcated by the brand’s 1930s logo).

None so gorgeously as 2020’s ‘splittable’ dual-second-hands chronograph, limited to just 100 lucky collectors. Adorned sumptuously with a cobalt enamel dial, the party trick lies in the ability to ‘split’ the stopwatch’s sweep second hand, and time two parallel events. But beyond the theatrics, it’s all about that dial. Evenly ground enamel powder is applied by hand with perfect consistency, then fired in a desktop oven to 800 degrees – give or take an agonisingly narrow margin of heat and time – dial by dial, with a rejection rate to test the most patient of souls.

1 2 1 Montblanc’s gorgeous new ‘rattrapante’ (£28,900) features a coiled ‘tachymetre’ scale allowing lengthier time-distancespeed calculations.

2 Minerva, whose facility Montblanc acquired in 2006, was a pioneer of early-20th-century sports timing.

BRONZE AGE Turning back maritime, with a living, breathing metal

Cynics will say it’s just an affordable means of innovation in a time of slowdown (about the same price as steel); others are simply in love with its warm, rough-hewn look. Either way, it is of course bronze’s close links with the maritime world that make it a particularly visceral choice for diving watches.

Since its resistance to corrosive seawater is much greater than that of iron, this copper alloy was once used for nearly all the outwardly-facing equipment found on a boat: portholes, handrails, cleats, winches and compass binnacles, as well as divers’ helmets.

But beyond the salty romance or brooding brown-gold tonality, Switzerland’s main usp from bronze casemaking is the patina that develops in reaction to external agents such as air, moisture, heat and friction.

This green-grey ‘crust’ isn’t corrosion, though. To the contrary, it is the bronze’s skin, a protective layer that slows down any further oxidation of the metal. And because it develops haphazardly, in accordance with your lifestyle, your place on the planet, how much you wear it, etc, every bronze watch’s patina is totally unique.

“Stainless steel is harder, so offers better possibilities for finishings and scratchresistance,” says Beat Fischli, coo at Oris.

“But bronze is alive; it changes its colour; it creates a patina layer. A watch made of bronze will tell a story to and about the enthusiast wearing it.”

Everyman horloger extraordinaire Oris wields bronze with particular panache, originally through its Carl Brashear editions – celebrating the first African-American person to become a us-navy diver back in the ’60s – and now the Hölstein, celebrating the very spot in Switzerland’s rolling Jura where Oris has been based since 1904. Both watchmaker and village have become synonymous with one another, employing over 1,000 locals by the ’60s, and what better than an all-bronze bracelet version of its Sixty-Five Divers Chronograph to celebrate its industrialised, yet refined might?

ALWAYS BELIEVE IN YOUR SOUL Gold! Now coppertinted for a rose-tinted wartime revival

As well as the word ‘fun’, another word that comes up when talking colour in watchmaking is ‘alchemy’. It certainly applies to enamelling, with all its miniature jars of silicate and ovens, and also to the advances being made in watchmaking’s two high-end case materials du jour: gold and ceramic.

One soft, warm and easily scratchable; the other completely the opposite.

At Panerai, red, rose, pink or yellow are simply not enough in the precious metal stakes. The brand’s most iconic offering, the Luminor Marina has realised its signature cushion case and levered crown-guard in trademarked Goldtech – a special 18-carat gold alloy, conjured up with an especially high percentage of copper as well as the presence of platinum. The purpose of the copper is to give the colour intensity and depth, while the platinum is there to lower the tarnishing effects of oxidation.

We’d like to think the Marina Militare’s elite naval frogmen of the ’30s would still be impressed by this highly sartorial modern take on their bespoke diving watches – realised all that time ago through Panerai’s relationship with Rolex.

2 3 1

1 The ‘Hölstein’ chronograph (£3,750) celebrates the titular village in the Jura mountains where Oris has successfully industrialised precision watchmaking since 1904, employing over 1,000 locals by the Sixties.

2 The clamp over the crown of Panerai’s new Luminor Marinam Goldtech (£20,600) provides subaqua security, should you graze against some coral.

3 ‘Marina’ comes from ‘Marina Militare’ – the Italian navy’s covert divers, who wore Panerais to time their rides on silent torpedoes.

Audemars Piguet is rewriting its future, and preserving its past, with a blossoming taste for the avant-garde Words by Alex Doak.

Photography by Marcus Schaefer

Do not adjust your sets: That most hardcore of complicated watchmakers, built solidly on the foundations of one historic model, really has gone out on a limb – not only in reinventing the modern codes of Brand Audemars Piguet in threedimensional form, but going all-out with a Pantone swatch book.

Seemingly taking its cues from the lurid colourways of 1970s soft furnishings, the code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet collection, whose launch last year ruffled so many feathers, has calmed those angry birds with an exuberant spectrum of novelties. From plummy burgundy to azure blue, via regal purple, their dials’ sunburst lacquers radiate a shimmering sense of depth, which makes even better sense of the underlying tension between code 11.59’s intricate octagonal vs circular case construct.

The ’70s comparison isn’t a bad one, as the eight-sided caseband has its roots firmly in the decade that taste forgot – ironic, given how stylish its original home, the Royal Oak was, and still is. It was a slow burner at the time, thanks to the frankly alien proposition of a luxurious steel sports watch with a price tag soaring above equivalent gold watches (everything to do with how tricky it was to machine and polish all those intricate facets in steel); slow, until Audemars Piguet started aligning keenly with highprofile golfers, then surprised everyone with 1993’s introduction of a beefed-up Offshore iteration – a Royal Oak “for young people” (albeit young people who lived on the Riviera).

Of course, there were detractors – a steroidal take on a luxury timepiece that couldn’t fit under a French cuff seemed as

far-fetched as a Ferrari with four seats.

But it proved to be a pioneer, cementing the continuing trend for uncompromising, statement wristwear. More significantly, it laid the foundations for Audemars Piguet’s modern-day phenomenon, in single-model, eight-sided form.

Not soon enough, code 11.59 is the long-overdue answer to ‘What other than Royal Oak?’ And in less than two years it has more than lived up to the expansion of its own acronym: Challenge, Own, Dare, Evolve; as well as that ‘What’s next?’ tease of a timecode. Like Royal Oak, it has effortlessly showcased the full suite of Audemars Piguet complications (chronograph, perpetual calendar, minute repeater. . . you name it, Audemars Piguet makes it), but with a softer, more artistic flair than the Oak’s brutal bezel and hexagonal screws.

There’s something else though. Because, when it comes to Swiss watchmaking, place is as important as product. From its mainstay in the sleepy village of Le Brassus, Audemars Piguet has reigned as high watchmaking wizard for nigh-on 175 years, deep in the heart of the Vallée de Joux – the 19th century’s equivalent of Silicon Valley, perched serenely above Geneva and home also to Jaeger-LeCoultre and Blancpain.

Heritage is everything, and even though Switzerland’s Jura Mountains are no longer reliant on dairy farmers pivoting to watchcomponent manufacture during the snowy winter months, watchmakers do like to stay local. So Audemars Piguet rightly stays put where it has been since 1875, expanding their historic home in increments, drawing on the local talent. And like Patek Philippe, Omega and Jaeger-LeCoultre before them, they’ve now immortalised their lineage with a purpose-built museum.

Only, no one expected this sort of museum. Imagined by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his BIG partnership, which laid the foundation stone as far back as 2017 (such was the complexity of the build), the new Musée Atelier absorbs the Audemars family house’s neighbouring, priceless collection within a futuristic spiral extension. Two interlocked ‘swoops’ are bedded into the valley’s slope, entirely supported by their curved glass walls and topped with a living roof.

As family pillar Jasmine Audemars concluded during the ceremony, “This project is far from simple, but it is important – not only for Audemars Piguet but for the entire Vallée de Joux. We thank our neighbours for their support, and especially for their taste for avantgarde projects!”

‘Avant-garde’ is putting it mildly, even for a serial disruptor like Audemars Piguet. Thanks to each glass wall’s heft, in combination with bronze-mesh shades, the interior is a dreamy open-plan space with an expansive aspect on the Joux valley and its cowbell-clanking residents. Walk the contoured corridors and you don’t just mingle with Audemars Piguet’s 300-odd historic artefacts, you’re rubbing shoulders with living history: the maison’s most elite watchmakers, toiling away at their new workbenches, dotted along the outer periphery.

Given that it takes eight months to assemble and adjust Audemars Piguet’s 684-piece catalogue topper, you’re unlikely to notice any more progress than when scrutinising the epic Universelle of 1899, frozen majestically at the heart of the Musée; but, on a watchmaking level at least, things do remain restless at the heart of the atelier.

And from the perspective of collectors, this restlessness is writ large by code 11.59 – a new history in the making.

Blake: A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing.

Always be closing. A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention; do I have your attention? Interest; are you interested? I know you are because it’s fuck or walk.

You close or you hit the bricks.

Decision; have you made your decision for Christ? And action.

A-I-D-A; get out there. You got the prospects comin’ in; you think they came in to get out of the rain? Guy doesn’t walk on the lot unless he wants to buy.

Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it? What’s the problem pal?

You, Moss.

Moss: You’re such a hero, you’re so rich, how come you’re coming down here, waste your time with such a bunch of bums?

Always Be Closing Our exclusive interview with Rolex’s arts testimonee Martin Scorsese underscores the director’s longlasting affair with his beloved Day-Date in yellow gold – but that’s just one of the watch’s iconic cinematic connections, as Alec Baldwin’s similarly iconic monologue in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) attests.

picture credit: new line cinema

Blake: You see this watch? You see this watch? That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make?

You see, pal, that’s who I am.