Boris Pjanic does not come from a family of retailers or jewelers, the watch collecting bug simply bit him at some point. “I carried this passion deep inside me for years before finally admitting to collecting rare vintage watches and even trading them among a very knowledgeable clientele out loud,” he confesses.
SalonQP isn’t simply a watch exhibition: it’s a watch exhibition inside an art gallery (the Saatchi Gallery), a setting that both the defines and enriches the brands and watches on display. And Hermès, very cleverly and very creatively, especially attracted visitors’ attention at SalonQP.
This young award is just barely three years old, but indeed it has already managed to reward some of the greatest personalities in the world of watches for their “passion” and “talent” – which are undeniably the most essential ingredients for the finest watchmaking. A jury from the Cultural Council of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH) honored two exceptional personalities in 2014: Philippe Dufour for his “talent” and Henry-John Belmont for his “passion.”
Earlier in 2014, Jaquet Droz announced a partnership with Lausanne’s Béjart Ballet. A ballet dancer perfectly masters the movements of his or her body, which makes for perfect allegory to Pierre Jaquet Droz’s lifelike mechanical androids using flow, flux, movement, and human expression through motion. Meet The Vulture and The Chief, two extraordinarily artistic Jaquet Droz timepieces paying homage to the dance.
SalonQP, London’s premier watch exhibition, ran from the 6th through the 8th of November 2014 at the prestigious Saatchi Art Gallery in central London. It was bigger and better than ever in terms of both size and visitor numbers.
Read on for more than just a few reasons (and lots of photos) why SalonQP is my favorite watch exhibition.
Follow us on a day spent with professional golfer and Richard Mille ambassador Diana Luna at the Ladies Lacoste Open de France. The picturesquely-situated Chantaco Golf Club near Biarritz, France, set the sunny scene for golf, watches, and champagne: the perfect environment for Richard Mille timepieces such as the RM 007, the brand-new RM 07-01 and the RM 016.
While this category in the 2014 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève is called “Mechanical Exception,” it could well be titled “exceptionally difficult to pick a winner.” And that’s because of the incredible selection of exceptional watches to choose from: Urwerk EMC, Jaquet Droz Bird Repeater, TAG Heuer Monaco V4 Tourbillon, MB&F Legacy Machine No. 2, Hublot, MP-05 LaFerrari, and Andreas Strehler Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle.
Ferdinand Adolph Lange had already been selling watches in Saxony’s capital city Dresden since 1844. Follow us on a historical journey through nineteenth-century Dresden to lightly trace the footsteps of the Glashütte watch industry’s founding father, which continues in the modern day with A. Lange & Söhne’s new boutique on New York City’s Madison Avenue.
On this sunny day in the La Chaux-de-Fonds factory, which is half charming eighteenth-century farmhouse and half state-of-the-art technical facility, I was entirely surprised by having learned something new about one of Greubel Forsey’s production elements: screws. The subject came up in passing at lunch, sparking great passion in Forsey despite what might seem to be a miniscule topic to the uninitiated.
The peacock’s iridescent colors are not actually pigment colors at all, but are reflections off the structure of the feathers, which have patterned nano-fiber components. Slight changes in the spacing of the nano-fibers produce different colors much in the same way as iridescent colors reflect off a film off brown/black oil or a butterfly’s wing. But they are none less beautiful for that.