Both Martin and Ian named the Giberg Niura Flying Tourbillon as their “best of show” in the Quill & Pad Baselworld 2018 round table. So why did two guys who usually don’t cast as much as a second glance at women’s watches come to decide that an overtly diamond-set timepiece was the best thing they saw at Baselworld? You’ll have to see it to find out. And it’s worth seeing!
Elizabeth caught up with Kiss drummer Eric Singer as Baselworld 2018 was drawing to a close, and he shared his personal list of the top ten watches he saw at the fair.
On a recent trip to Bordeaux to check if they were still making decent plonk (yes, job done), I noticed a small coffee shop near my hotel doing a roaring trade day and night despite being tucked away on a small side street. I decided this had to do with its street advertising, and it made me think that watch marketing managers could wake up, smell the coffee, and make us smile more!
While Zodiac isn’t an obvious brand for us to feature on Quill & Pad, when I spoke to Kiss drummer Eric Singer at Baselworld and he excitedly told me that he had co-designed the new Zodiac Super Sea Wolf Topper Edition, I was intrigued. Singer has a great eye when it comes to all that is good (and not so good) about watches, both modern and vintage, and why certain designs work or don’t work.
I had the good fortune to visit Rome on Thursday for the opening of ‘Watchmakers: The Masters of Art Horology’ at the Maxxi Gallery in Rome, and if you have a few minutes I’d like to share the evening with you and let you know where you might be able to see the exhibition in the near future.
Seiko’s story is much more complicated than most people might think. This is a manufacturer that doesn’t follow trends, but has created a few of its own, capitalizing on various types of expertise and knowledge that were the mother of necessity for a manufacturer located so far away from the established centers of watchmaking in Europe. Grand Seiko is the most appealing line to connoisseurs of fine watchmaking, and we look at it in some depth here.
The mechanical watch works just like a metronome, with its isochronic balance maintaining a steady rhythm and the delicate tick-tock of its pallet jewels providing a rhythmic beat to our oft-frantic lives. If we ramp up the power and swap the metronome for a drum kit and a few electric guitars we have rock and roll! But which watches do rock-and-roll icons wear?
In this article I compare the new Santos de Cartier Skeleton to the Santos-Dumont Squelette from 2010 as these two models are from the same family, have a lot in common, and share the same high-end caliber.
When they hear the name Fabergé, most people immediately think of imperial Easter eggs. The egg tradition hatched in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III commissioned his first Easter egg from Fabergé as a gift to his wife, Empress Maria Feodor. This became a yearly tradition, with Fabergé creating 50 eggs in total for the Russian court up to 1916. Here we have the story of the Yusupov Egg of 1907 and how it was restore by Parmigiani.
Ah, Paris! City of Lights. For the watch collector, it’s a great place to visit with boutiques aplenty, some owned and operated by the major brands; high-end mega-stores like Bucherer; and smaller independent retailers like Chronopassion and Dubail. Gary took a quick weekend trip to Paris and while there he took the opportunity to pack in as much fun as possible. Come along and bienvenue!