Three’s a trend
The Baselworld watch and jewellery fair was bigger than ever this March, with over 150,000 visitors thronging this indoor city of gleaming brand pavilions, conducting billions of euros of business in 10 short days and setting the watch trends for the year to come. But in among the pizzazz, there was some rare subtlety and charm to be found, from frothy colourways to a renewed focus on the dial markings themselves…
Watch dials tend to fall back on the same old styles of numerals and markings, despite them being the bits we look at the most. So praise be for this year’s apparent typeface-lift – admittedly at the hands of brands who do design particularly well, but hopefully spelling the start of a typographic revolution.
Hermès Slim d’Hermès
£11,400
This delicate exercise in horological typography is something so quintessentially “Hermès” in all its Parisian whimsy that it’s difficult to accept it’s not been in the brand’s oeuvre all along. The French graphic designer Philippe Apeloig designed a completely original suite of numerals for “Slim”, and the result feels at once harmonious, rigorous and chic.
hermes.com
Nomos Glashütte Minimatik
£2,600
Style and substance: something that Nomos does in spades. So the German brand was never going to rest on its laurels with the new DUW 3001 slimline automatic movement – for one, it’s housed in a beautiful new watch case designed by Studio Hannes Wettstein, just for women, and it boasts an infectiously cheerful numeral design created in-house at the watchmaker’s Berlin studio. Apparently, inkblots on a school desk were the inspiration. See, you’re smiling already.
nomos-glashuette.com
Mondaine Helvetica NY Edition
£335
Best known for its reproduction of the Swiss Railways’ platform clock, every architect’s favourite watch brand, Mondaine is now drawing from another Swiss design classic: Helvetica. This year’s edition is a clever tribute to another railway, which uses the ubiquitous font in its signage: the New York Subway, available in stitching colour-coded to the principle lines (themselves Pantones, making this a graphic designer’s dream).
mondaine.com
We could go blue in the face over the swathe of cobalt, navy and petrol dials found everywhere right now. Which is fine – a blue dial is very becoming, after all – but what’s far more fun is the fact that Switzerland is loosening up and enjoying the fact its esteemed horological output is being treated as much as a fashion item as a macho status symbol. Cue technicolour mayhem…
Longines Heritage
Diver 1967
£2,060
Ever since 2007’s Legend Diver – a gorgeous and totally faithful Sixties revival – Longines has reminded us annually of its surprisingly colourful past with the Heritage range, benefitting from Longines HQ’s extraordinarily curated archive. This year’s reissue is another Sixties waterbaby, but it couldn’t look more different, thanks to that rich burgundy bezel, so luscious and well-rounded that it begs to be paired with a cheeky camembert.
longines.com
TAG Heuer Formula 1 CR7
£1,200
There was a time, somewhere around the eighties, that TAG was the entry-level brand for kids wanting in on the Swiss thing. And 2015 will be known as the year things (rightly) returned to this state, after years of edging up the horological hierarchy – hence the arrival of Ms Delevigne and Mr Guetta on the ads, and this funky new Cristiano Ronaldo edition of TAG’s motorsport-inspired watch (somewhat confusingly).
tagheuer.com
Oris Aquis Depth Gauge
£2,300
Featured prominently on the pages of London Time two years back, we all loved Oris’s forehead-slappingly elegant means of gauging diving depth: by allowing a capillary of water to increasingly enter a calibrated channel around the dial the deeper you go. This year, the watch (still priced amazingly well) gains a matte diamond-like-carbon case coating, offset by a lurid, acid-yellow rubber strap. A wicked combo of tech meets techno.
oris.ch
Gone is the notion that luxury is lush – away with ponderous platinum or garish gold – and in with the sleek, streamlined and positively scientific. The new luxury involves lightweight, hi-tech and future-forward materials pioneered by the Swiss watchmakers’ neighbouring micro-tech firms – the only people keeping something as anachronistic as a mechanical watch ahead of the game in 2015.
Maurice Lacroix Pontos S Extreme
£3,800
Ceramic, titanium, magnesium, aluminium, zinc… it’s all been done. So full marks to Maurice Lacroix for stretching to a high-tech material that’s a cocktail of all the above: “Powerlite”, three times lighter than steel and twice as hard. Plus, it looks and feels rather like unpainted Airfix. Which, for boys who like their toys, is a Good Thing.
mauricelacroix.com
Rado HyperChrome Si3N4
£2,800
Rado is Swiss watchmaking’s king of high-tech materials, pioneering rock-hard tungsten carbide in the Sixties and using ceramic in appropriately futuristic-looking watches for the first time in the Eighties. Ever innovative, this introduces silicon nitride to the mix, usually intended for automotive engine parts. While its hardness of 1,450 Vickers renders it scratchproof, a density of 3.4g/cm³ means it’s less than half the weight of its former ceramic watches.
rado.com
Bell & Ross BR-X1 Carbon Forgé
£14,900
Audemars Piguet pioneered the forged-carbon process in watchmaking a few years back – packing bundles of carbon-fibre strands into a mould and heating under pressure to give a hard, lightweight black case with a random marbling effect. The patent appears to have been relaxed this year, judging by the number of other forged-carbon launches, but Bell & Ross is the clear favourite, not least for its clever combination of high-tech ceramic and rubber inserts, in and around the single-unit carbon case. A stealth fighter for the wrist.
bellross.com