The chronograph remains one of the most popular complications – and for a good reason. While most of us only use it as a mobile egg timer, chronographs both add a lot of dynamic to the look of a watch and give the wearer a sense of control. Watches & Wonders 2021 is not short on chronographs, which come in their usual wide variety of interpretations. Martin Green highlights five of the most interesting from the digital fair.
Salmon-colored dials are still niche market and Martin Green doesn’t expect them to go mainstream anytime soon. Nonetheless, pink has become something of a buzz topic, and here he shares a few of his favorite watches with pink, pinkish, or salmon-colored dials.
While the Collection Privée Cartier Paris was the definitive illustration of a time of forgotten elegance, Cartier’s Fine Watch Making Collection, despite its extremely high quality and finishing, became one of the best examples of a disaster in the trend of pretentious haute horlogerie of the last decade. So what’s going on with Cartier’s high watchmaking division now?
Can a watch by Cartier really be underwhelming? Martin Green thinks so in the case of the new Cartier Tank Cintrée 100th anniversary limited edition. A stunning watch certainly, but so close to the 1921 original that he finds it just a bit too predictable. But that’s not all that niggles him.
George Cramer was pleased to see a stunning new historically inspired Santos-Dumont model in stainless steel at SIHH 2019. And to his Cartier-enamored eye it looks even better than the model from the now-defunct Collection Privée Cartier Paris (CPCP) line.
Why is it that watch brands celebrate watch anniversaries so enthusiastically? The answer isn’t as complicated as you might think . . . here we illustrate the answer with some major brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Cartier, Chanel, and Omega, who celebrated some major watch anniversaries back in 2017.
In the 1968 film ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ Steve McQueen played the title character, a millionaire businessman and avid sportsman involved in a cat-and-mouse game with an insurance claims investigator played by Faye Dunaway. McQueen chose two of his personal watches to wear in the film: an elegant Cartier Tank Cintrée and a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox. But when Nick Gould looked further into this, he discovered that contrary to popular opinion McQueen also surprisingly owned a Tank.
Nineteenth-century French horologist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a man now famous as the father of modern magic, inspired Cartier to begin dabbling in mystery clocks in 1912. And the famous brand has never stopped as a 2018 exhibition showing 19 historical mystery clocks so richly illustrated.
What happens when form dominates function nearly completely and the watch itself becomes a canvas for art? What if artistic freedom can be enjoyed without time being the primary purpose? Martin Green highlights three great examples here.
Diamond-set watches can be objects of art, Martin Green argues. And here he highlights three 2020 launches that caught his eye with their scintillating fire and great use of the precious stones.