Imagine you wake up tomorrow and that in-your-wildest-dreams watch now only costs 10 percent of what it did yesterday. Admittedly that’s still very expensive, but now it’s within reach. You might have to tighten your belt for a while, but you can now own that fantasy watch you have long dreamed of. My bet is that you will not be happy for long, and here’s why.
While there are no lack of lights, colors, and sparkles during the day at Baselworld, it’s when the lights go down that you get to learn which watches come out and party after the sun goes down.
Here are a few of the watches that I saw donning their colorful glow-in-the-dark party clothes at Baselworld 2017!
The year 2017 wasn’t just good for both interesting and exciting new wristwatches at Baselworld: I’d go so far to rate it as a vintage year. This article started as a pure Top 5 rundown, but the sheer number of superb watches soon had us reaching for our “Special Mention” over spill. And that’s all without the really big surprises. So without further ado, welcome to our team’s top picks of Baselworld 2017.
When you strip away complexity, there is nowhere to hide: everything has to be absolutely perfect because the viewer’s gaze has no distractions. Just as the smallest of scratches on the otherwise unblemished paintwork of a new car appear magnified to our eyes, the design and execution of a relatively simple watch have to be flawless.
It should surprise no one that the Greubel Forsey Balancier has achieved that.
In 2005 I visited Baselworld a portable 20x magnification stereo microscope. Over a few days of examining hundreds of watches, there were only two that stood out as having dials that were flawless under the microscope’s intense scrutiny: one was the wild Harry Winston Opus V by a young brand called Urwerk that had yet to celebrate its tenth birthday. This year Urwerk celebrates its twentieth anniversary and what a 20 years it has been!
Blast from the past! This post is a “reprint” of an article I wrote that was first published on The PuristS in 2005. This article is divided into four parts: Felix Baumgartner and Urwerk, Harry Winston Rare Timepieces and the Opus V, The Urwerk 103.03, and The Urwerk 103.03 user review.
I’m an expat Aussie who has now lived longer out of Australia than in, but in a few years my (Swiss) wife and I are planning on moving from Switzerland to Airlie Beach in North Queensland, Australia. In September 2016, I flew to the region for a week’s worth of face-to-face meetings to help lay the groundwork for our move.
It was a tight schedule, especially as I was sure to be suffering from jetlag, but it was doable. Especially with the Ulysse Nardin Dual Time on my wrist to help keep track of time there and at home.
Fine watch and fine whisky, for many the two go together like single malt birds of a feather. Urwerk founders Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei have been known to enjoy a smooth amber tipple or two, and as discerning gentlemen with discerning taste in haute horlogerie, it’s perhaps not surprising that Baumgartner and Frei also have discerning taste when it comes to whisky: single malt by The Macallan.
The initial key concepts for the AgenGraphe chronograph included having the elapsed time indicators displaying around the center hole, so that the indications were large and highly legible, and that the minute and hour displays jumped instantaneously so that there could be no confusion when reading elapsed time. But the new chronograph ended up offering much more than that. Much more!
It’s no exaggeration to say that here at Quill & Pad we are big fans of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso. And now Urwerk introduces its own, very robust version of a reversible watch: the UR-T8 “Transformer.”