Latest watch news · Page 1627

Today I feature Opus 7, a collaboration with Andreas Strahler. The Opus Project by Harry Winston is a remarkable initiative. Started some 12 years ago, now we are at edition Opus 12…the project uses the considerable resources of the Harry Winston company in cooperation with master watchmakers to create interesting and very innovative designs, marketedRead More

My interview with Hamdi Chatti, the vice president of Louis Vuitton Watches, was one of the most interesting of the 2012 Basel fair. The main topic of conversation related to this: I strongly believe that in the years ahead, the strongest and most established brands will only become stronger and continue to gain market share. […]

Vacheron Constantin’s tonneau-shaped watch, the Malte, celebrates 100 years with two new models It’s been a century since Vacheron Constantin introduced its first tonneau-shaped wristwatch - which was probably among the first series-produced wristwatches ever made, as 100 years ago, in 1912, the wristwatch was still very much a novelty, tonneau or otherwise. The tonneau shape […]

The Rise Of Patek Philippine’s Nautilus The year of the Nautilus was 1976. Out in the wider world, the space race had recently culminated in the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission that saw a US Apollo craft dock with the Soviet Soyuz 19 in space - an extended act of diplomacy. The Cold War was at the uneasy stage of hiatus known […]

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Grande Reverso Blue Enamel sings the blues like no lady ever has The color blue has often been associated with the most iconoclastic work of the 20th century’s cultural contributors. “Rhapsody in Blue” established George Gershwin’s reputation as one of America’s seminal composers. “Blue Train”, John Coltrane’s 32-bar form masterpiece and also the name […]

I am trying to learn how to Dougie. For those of you who are not as sentiently tapped into the zeitgeist of rap culture, this is a dance that involves you moving from side to side whilst rolling your shoulders, ironically enough, kind of like Axl Rose. This is important for me because I like […]

Many brands claim their minute repeaters sound the best. But who can tell the difference? Who has access to several such watches at the same time? We’ve gathered, recorded and ranked five of them, On paper, and also on video EDITOR’S NOTE: The judging of minute repeaters, as our intrepid contributor David Chokron states below, […]

REVOLUTION PUTS ERIC GIROUD (OWNER AND DESIGNER, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS) AND JEAN-MARC WIEDERRECHT (FOUNDER AND WATCHMAKER, AGENHOR) UNDER THE LOUPE FOR SOME QUALITY Q&A; Eric Giroud and Jean-Marc Wiederrecht are no strangers to each other, having collaborated on projects such as the gem-clad Harry Winston Opus 9 and MB&F;’s Horological Machines. Together or apart, the […]

Mechanical oscillators like the pendulum and balance wheel are what actually tell time - and today’s latest experiments by some of watchmaking’s most daring researchers are paving the way for the watches of tomorrow   At their most basic, any time-measuring device - whether it’s a longcase pendulum clock, or the most sophisticated cesium fountain […]

It’s an old story: boy meets dive watch, boy gets dive watch, boy gets a lot of snarky flak from people who ask him why he wears a dive watch when the deepest body of water he ever gets into comes in a porcelain tub, with spigots marked “Hot” and “Cold”. Oh, ye of little […]

Far and away the most tested watches in the world, Omega’s Speedmasters have remained miles beyond (and, quite often, above) the competition It’s hard to make a good spinoff. Take Baywatch Nights, the offshoot of the ’90s beach drama that bombarded audiences with bodacious, buxom bods (and, with 1.1 billion viewers worldwide - surely transfixed […]

William Cowper’s poem, The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk, popularized the phrase “the monarch of all I survey”. And in some ways, the world’s most legendary balls, which the iconic Parisian jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels has seen fit to pay tribute to with a series of exceptional watches, are each expressions of one individual’s remaking of […]

A new world-time watch from iwc, inspired by its highly coveted historical mark timepieces The enforced passivity of modern air travel has probably been responsible for more fantasies of actually sitting in the cockpit of a high-performance fighter jet than The Right Stuff, Top Gun and all of the Iron Eagle movies put together. But for […]

The rotonde de cartier annual calendar is a robust and practical addition to the brand’s collection Thirty days hath September, April, June and November,” goeth the doggerel verse, reminding us of the irregularity of the Gregorian calendar - a verse which also serves to remind owners of mechanical watches with simple calendars that for five […]

The governor is one of the most critical components in a chiming watch. It’s responsible for setting the tempo at which the watch chimes and ensuring that it’s neither too fast nor too slow. If the hammer and gongs are the orchestra, the governor is the conductor. Ideally, the governor of a repeater does its […]

It’s the queen of complications and really understanding it is a lifetime study - but you gotta start somewhere. REVOLUTION brings you a brief introduction to some of the inside secrets of watchmaking’s most romantic complication The minute repeater is both the most sophisticated of complications and the most atavistic - sophisticated, in that it requires enormous […]

FOUR DECADES OF THE REMARKABLE ROYAL OAK FROM AUDEMARS PIGUET There are certainly watches made in larger numbers, but there are few more instantly recognizable than the Royal Oak, from Audemars Piguet. Forty years since its 1972 introduction, the Royal Oak has become not only the watch associated by enthusiasts with the small Le Brassus-based […]

A. lange & Söhne’s saxonia thin is the manufacture’s slimmest watch to date In what must count as one of the biggest comebacks since the mechanical wristwatch reinvented itself in the post-quartz era as a luxury necessity, the thin dress watch - once driven underground and nearly into extinction by the dinosaurian dimensions toward which […]

Words by owner of watch. Photograph taken by me, by a window table in a restaurant in Dempsey Hill, Singapore. I bought this a few years ago while I was visiting Europe and Curtis Thomson advised me to visit the watchmaker Jean Baptiste Viot since France was my last stop. I tried to read upRead More

Glashutte Original is one of the few truly self sustaining watchmakers in the industry. The value addition and self reliance was born out of neccessity, when they operated as GUB during the GDR times. And continued to the modern GO re-founded by Pfeiffer in the early 1990s. For BaselWorld 2012, GO announced a very complicatedRead More

A. Lange & Sohne has been producing beautiful watches since 1845, with a 40+ year gap, when Glashutte was under GDR rule, where no luxury timepieces were manufactured. As many know, the company was revived in 1990, and started production in 1994. But sometimes, the old pieces are still as beautiful, and here is aRead More

Francois Paul Journe. A talented watchmaker. I had the pleasure of meeting with FP way back when he was yet a nobody…and had just made his first tourbillon remontoir d’egalité. The original looked like it was made in his garage, and indeed it was. But recently, I had the pleasure of spending a week withRead More

Watchmaking companies do not often make interesting mechanical watches for ladies. Precious few do. Amongst them some do justice for the ladies…I count Lange, JLC, and Parmigiani amongst the few. I show today, a beautiful piece in the current Parmigiani collection…the Kalpa Donna The bezel is still studded with diamonds, for some bling…we gotta haveRead More