Welcome to the 2016 edition of Quill & Pad’s early Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève predictions in which the team picks favorites. Our panel is divided due to the impressive number of sensational watches on offer. Find out why!
Our panel members choose their winners in the Men’s category of the GPHG between the Czapek Genève 33 bis Quai des Bergues, Tudor’s Heritage Black Bay, the Hermès Slim d’Hermès Email, Chopard’s L.U.C XPS 1860, Urban Jürgensen’s Reference 2340, and the Grönefeld 1941 Remontoire.
During a recent trip to Paris, I stopped by Hermès’ Faubourg Saint-Honoré boutique to look at the Crafting Time exhibition. A highlight was the intriguing Hermès Arceau Pocket Ailes et Ecailles, whose dial is uniquely embellished with scarab beetle elytra fragments in a beautiful shimmering mosaic.
Hermès has set the bar extremely high with the exquisite artistry in the enamel work of Arceau Tigre Email Ombrant, whose name refers to a new enamel-and-engraving approach inspired by an old lithographic technique used in the Limoges region of France.
Please join our Quill & Pad round table discussion on Baselworld 2016. This time we take on some of the same topics that GaryG and his collector group use to the discuss their impressions of a watch fair: best of show, worst of show, watch you would buy with your own money, watch you would buy if money were no object, investment watch, patronage watch, fun watch, and a fantasy money no object watch.
La Montre Hermès now creates top-of-the-line, aesthetically coherent, and mechanically interesting watches. And this statement is true in two watch categories: ultra-high-end, complicated haute horlogerie and daily wearer. At Baselworld 2016, Hermès returns to the beautiful Slim d’Hermès. And for me, the biggest launch among these is indubitably the exquisite Slim d’Hermès Email Grand Feu.
If you’ve ever been to Mexico, you know that vivid colors are the order of the day, particularly when it comes to local art forms. La Montre Hermès envisioned the dial of the svelte Slim d’Hermès Mille Fleurs du Mexique wristwatch as a painting framed by a circle of white gold instead of a square wooden frame. The Mexican tapestry motif taken from an original Hermès scarf is painstakingly applied by hand to create a miniature painting on a fragile mother-of-pearl dial.
It’s pretty interesting to us to find out what you like to read most, and we hope that it’s interesting for you to read, too – particularly at the end of the old year. For this reason, we bring you the top ten most-clicked posts of 2015 on Quill & Pad. Without further ado, here they are in no particular order.
The La Montre Hermès’ factory has something that no other watch brand can boast: its own in-house strap production. The leather strap workshop was added to the purpose-built factory resembling the headquarters in Paris in October 2009. And though it is located in a “factory,” the strap-making process can hardly be called industrial; I would describe this craft needing a great deal of artistic grace as artisanal.
The evening of Thursday, October 29, 2015 played host to the red-carpet gala evening in Geneva for the presentation of prizes in the 2015 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. We will be sharing our thoughts and insights on the winners of the big night, and why those not so lucky may have missed out. But without further ado, here are the brands and watches that went home with a well-deserved trophy.