The Red Dot is inarguably the most important and widely recognized of all design awards. Until the 2015 edition of the competition, there was no dedicated watch category. That changed and now the prestigious German prize counts a three-man jury dedicated exclusively to watches. Elizabeth Doerr takes a look at this year’s crop of Red Dot prize winners in the watch category.
Chances are that if you have a pulse, you have probably watched – or perhaps even read – some of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series. And unless you live at the bottom of the Eyrie, you are probably aware how popular the series is. And if so, you may also be interested in Montegrappa’s set of pens paying tribute to the dragonlicious show
Please join our traditional Quill & Pad round table discussion on Baselworld 2019, where we discuss what we did and didn’t like at the world’s largest annual watch exhibition.
Elizabeth Doerr arrived home exhausted from the extravaganza that was Baselworld 2019, but was still running on enough residual adrenaline to get a few words out and jotted them down. Here are a few of her thoughts from the fair while they are still fresh.
Baselworld is fighting for its life, but new management under Michel Loris-Melikoff unveiled ambitious plans for the future that Elizabeth Doerr shares with us here.
Zenith’s Defy Inventor includes successful implementation of Zenith’s futuristic compliant component which offers insensitivity to temperature, gravity, and magnetic fields as well as no need for lubrication. It may even help change how mechanical watches are viewed and made. This is some futuristic stuff!
Early American historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich titled her 2008 book ‘Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.’ Ulrich would probably be very interested to know about three famous Swiss and French brands whose very first wristwatches were made for – and in a way by – women. These watches by Breguet, Hermès, and Patek Philippe have made history.
Greubel Forsey introduces the Quadruple Tourbillon GMT, a watch combining the unbelievable titanium-globed multiple time zone complication from the GMT Earth and the brand’s second fundamental invention, the Quadruple Tourbillon. Combining these two stunning elements into one watch is incredibly challenging: necessitating the creation of a whole new caliber, the Quadruple Tourbillon GMT demonstrates (again) the mastery of this brand when it comes to the architectural art of precision timekeeping.
Chopard co-president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele had an opportunity for a retail space in Monaco and had the choice of making another Chopard boutique – which he really didn’t need – or not keeping the space (which was too good to pass on). The third idea idea was to create a multi-brand environment, but Art in Time turned into much more than that: it is an unusual space for unusually creative high-end watchmaking.
When most people think of Seiko, they think of the mass-produced quartz watches that dominated the world’s markets in the 1980s and thereafter. What many don’t realize is that Seiko, one of only a handful of companies able to manufacture a watch from A to Z, makes the full range all the way up to full-on mechanical handmade horological delicacies with fine finishing and artful embellishment. And they don’t come more full on than the Seiko Credor Fugaku Tourbillon.