In honor of Mother’s Day we revisit four fantastic openwork watches that Vacheron Constantin presented earlier this year at the SIHH in Geneva. The idea with openwork, aka skeletonization, is to remove as much of the material as possible to reveal the mechanisms beneath the dial, while ensuring it remains looking elegant and is still structurally rigid enough for its purpose.
This is the last in our three-part series on tourbillons from Baselworld 2014. It includes fantastic timepieces from Blancpain, Greubel Forsey, Girard-Perregaux, Hautlence and Vianney Halter I have stretched the criteria a little here: while I saw the Greubel Forsey and Vianney Halter watches during Baselworld, neither of them was actually exhibiting at the fair.
Continuing our series on tourbillons from Baselworld 2014, here are a few from Breguet, Chopard, Ulysse Nardin, Grönefeld and Kari Voutilainen.
This week we present a video-rich roundup of the recent news so pour yourself a large glass, get yourself comfortable, scroll down and enjoy.
The week’s review includes: Urwerk’s new UR-105M, both Vacheron Constantin and IWC supporting film and the arts at the Tribeca Film Festival, Girard-Perregaux’s new blue Sea Hawk, Jaeger-LeCoultre honoring Charlie Chaplin, a quick look at the best on the net, plus a few well-known horological figures giving their Baselworld Top-5 for The Watches TV.
Wild watches get ever wilder and ever more numerous and like any addict, we need more and more just to reach the same horological high. One of the first avant garde brands that started us all on this exhilarating ride isn’t really playing the same game at all: Urwerk. In an era when new models appear to be designed as much, if not more, for shock-and-awe as they are for time keeping, the UR-105M paradoxically looks both cutting-edge-modern and reassuringly familiar.
“Art”, what is it? If we allow that horology at its finest can indeed be art, then I have no problem accepting Romain Gauthier’s Logical one as art. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder (and mine sees beauty in Logical one), there is no denying Romain Gauthier’s fertile imagination in reinventing the chain and fusee, eliminating the ubiquitous winding crown, improving the mainspring barrel and adding a few diamonds!
While Baselworld 2014 was not a particularly big year for tourbillons, they were still an important element in the collections of most brands and a few of them were truly exceptional. Here are just a few of the tourbillons that passed in front of my lens at Baselworld 2014.
With the horological storm that is Baselworld slowing calming down, we thought this might be a quiet news week; however, it turned out to be busy with news from Rolex, Richard Mille, Audemars Piguet, Zenith, Montblanc, Antiquorum, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Hublot, Digital Luxury Group and F.P. Journe.
The most common choice for classic dress watches has to be gold, but have you ever wondered where that gold originally came from? And by “originally” I’m not referring to a gold mine on earth but the original source of the gold even before it arrived on our planet. Spoiler alert: it involves an explosion, a very big explosion!
While the two most well known German brands are A. Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original, there are quite a few smaller German brands deserving our attention. Some with names you may have heard of, a few you may not have: Nomos, Lange & Heyne, Tutima, Kudoke and Leinfelder among them.