Twelve years ago, Blancpain surprised the watch world by introducing a watch in their Villeret collection that featured a traditional Chinese calendar. For 2024, Blanpain releases a limited edition in red gold with oven-fired green enamel dial.
The good news is that prices have fallen less in 2024 than they did in 2023 or 2022.We probably haven’t seen the secondary market represent this much value-for-money since before COVID.
The Omega x Swatch Speedmaster MoonWatch was one of the biggest product launches of the decade. Raman Kalra eventually managed to get his hands on one and shares his thoughts here.
When Ball Watch asked Dietmar Fuchs to test dive one of the company’s newest watches, the Engineer Master II Diver Chronometer, he hesitated at first. Ball didn’t jingle a diving bell for him, but something else from its history jangled: a brand’s “history” section is always the first thing he checks before testing a watch and he discovered Ball Watch has the credentials. So he dove in and now shares his experience and thoughts on the watch here.
The Roger W. Smith Series 4 is a real crown jewel, both out of respect and a sense that its inherent quality is obscured by less extraordinary but more bombastic rivals. It’s austere, deliberately reserved, and quietly confident amid a world of indie watches buffed and beveled brightly enough to blind an eye.
GaryG’s first rule when it comes to collecting is to avoid setting too many exclusionary rules. With watches, he believes that it’s the passion that separates collectors from investors and accumulators. Which brings him to another rule: deriving the full enjoyment from the things you own.
GaryG’s thoughts have turned to one major system that is always there, but generally hidden from sight: the movement. Here are a few of his favorites and why. And in the philosophy of putting my money where my mouth is, these movements have appeared in one or more watches that he has owned personally.
With it’s open dial and sweeping skeletonized bridges, Andreas Strehler’s Papillon d’or is both a horological and visual masterpiece.
Now with his new Faune et Flore collection, Strehler takes the Papillon d’or to an even high artistic level.
The rise of the internet, and the consequent evolution of the watch-watching community, has inevitably amplified the phenomenon whereby certain objects have come to exert an extraordinary hold over the collective imagination. Here, Colin Alexander Smith debunks three watch myths circulating widely and freely online and in print concerning former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Rolex and Patek Philippe, the Khanjar Rolex Sea-Dwellers, and what in fact Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were wearing on their wrists as they summited Mount Everest.
Simon Brette unveils the “Rose Gold” edition of his GPHG-winning Chronomètre Artisans timepiece: it’s a sensational harmony of the warm rose/red gold case and intense-black ‘dragon scale’ dial.