TIMELINE
FRESH MANIFESTO
ROX MAGAZINE
THROUGH THE
PORTHOLE What began as an indie startup based solely on a nautical motif has, in four short decades, become the Hublot we now know: massive, in every sense of the word. Words by Alex Doak.
I
t’s hard to imagine the apprehension that Carlo Crocco must have felt in 1980 when he stood at the Hublot stand at the Basel watch fair. No one had ever heard of him, and no one had ever seen a watch like his. The scion of the Italian Binda Group dynasty, best known for making Breil watches, Carlo Crocco struck out on his own in 1976 to create something disruptive. Moving to Switzerland he formed MDM Genève (standing for Montres Danielle Marie, after Crocco's wife) and soon settled on what’s become an enduring icon of 20th-century watch design: an angular case, mounted by a circular bezel and 12 exposed screws, looking just like a boat’s porthole, whose French translation he adopted for his brand. Contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t the titular case construct that posed the biggest challenge. It was Crocco’s decision to fit his ‘Hublots’ with the first-ever truly natural rubber strap in Switzerland’s history. In the late 1970s
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there was no one who knew how to work rubber to luxury watchmaking’s standards, so Crocco looked to tyre producers to create the exact mix of rubber, reinforced by an inner steel blade for thinness, flexibility and resilience. The genius touch was to add a vanilla scent to the mix, masking the slight acrid smell of the rubber. The fact that we now see rubber so frequently throughout watches and jewellery – in rebellious ‘fusion’ with bling-bling gold – can be credited entirely to Crocco. Fast forward to 2004, and from there onwards, the rest is history. For it was that year when industry maven Jean-Claude Biver took the helm and things went into overdrive. The ‘Big Bang’ chronograph, FIFA and Ferrari partnerships, hiphop kudos, an ever-expanding factory with every mechanical complication mastered and plenty others pioneered… There is, quite simply, no other brand quite like Hublot.
