BaselWorld has become a ritual event. It is the big powwow that attracts watch tribes from all around the world who come to reaffirm their devotion to this vast clan that makes up the international industry of time. As might be expected, this annual gathering started with a large conference organized by the chiefs of the various manufacturing and marketing tribes.
The very first day, these top leaders announced that: the “sky now has fewer clouds” than last year; the storm that had ravaged the lands has in fact “swept away the excesses”; and, according to the now commonplace phrase, “the strong were able to ride out the storm, and have become stronger in the process.”
Their first observation was that the watch and jewellery industries had succeeded in taking shelter in their wigwams in 2009, and that they were thus able to absorb part of the collateral damage from the economic tempest "relatively" well. As proof of this, the grand chiefs of BaselWorld pointed to the numbers of the various tribal participants: in 2009, there were 1,956 exhibitors; in 2010, there were 1,915. This modest decline of 2.096 per cent must be taken in perspective, they insisted, in light of the 25 per cent decline in watch sales. The different tribes had all therefore been able to accumulate some reserves, stored in their underground kivas during the grand festivals of the previous years of folly. Business could, they predicted, begin again but “with prudence and circumspection”.
“It is the end of the era of exuberance,” warned one of the most respectable grand chieftains of the Basel powwow, Jacques Duchêne, president of the exhibitors committee, who cel-ebrated his 60th year of participation in the event. “Let’s return to true, traditional and tangible values,” he strongly advised, “because the consumer today makes his choices with more forethought, which should benefit those industry players who are the most established and the most serious.”
Is it really over for the grand nuptials of the watchmaking start-ups? Would they be dismissed, all these small players—so ambitious and so determined to disturb the creative landscape—if it were not about economics? Is there really only space for the “most established” brands?
Would we get a few answers to these and other questions in the ‘watchful’ week that was opening before us? Were the designs of the new pieces smaller for the most part, as everyone said they would be? Were the new designs really more subdued this year?
As we will see by what follows, the answers to these questions are much more nuanced than we might have imagined. There seems, in fact, to be a certain amount of confusion as we approach the turning point between the ultra-permissive epoch that has just ended and the undoubtedly more constrained and measured era that is opening before us. But is this obvious?
One to one or all in one?
Let’s take for example, the new L.U.C. collection presented by Chopard. (By the way, the family brand is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.) These four new models—very well designed by Guy Bovet, a renegade from the IWC tribe where he worked before—are equipped with four new in-house calibres, which correspond to, all by themselves, the four cardinal points of today’s trends.
The first is represented by the absolute simplicity and sobriety seen in the round automatic L.U.C. 1937, equipped with the first Manufacture Fleurier calibre (based on the L.U.C 1.010 movement designed to be produced on an industrial scale).
The second is a stylistic rupture with the past as shown by the ultra-light L.U.C. Engine One Tourbillon, whose movement—equipped with a tourbillon with an aluminium carriage—is ‘manufactured like a motor block’ and is mounted on ‘silent blocks’ located on the inside of its titanium case.
L.U.C. Engine One Tourbillon by Chopard
L.U.C 150 ‘ALL IN ONE’, L.U.C. 1937 and L.U.C LOUIS-ULYSSE THE TRIBUTE by Chopard
A completely different type of cardinal point on the watchmaking compass is paying homage to history, which in Chopard’s case takes on an entirely different form in the L.U.C Louis-Ulysse The Tribute. With its imposing 49.6-mm diameter, it resembles both a wristwatch and a pocket watch, thanks to an ingenious system inspired by an invention of Karl Scheufele I dating back to 1912, which allows the pocket watch to be attached to a leather strap. The manual-winding mechanical movement created for this homage bears the particular appellation, L.U.C EHG, because Chopard developed this COSC movement—bearing the Poinçon de Genève (Geneva Seal)—in collaboration with the Geneva watchmaking school, the Ecole d’Horlogerie (EHG). Over the next decade, the L.U.C EHG will provide students of the EHG with a kit allowing them to realize the traditional ‘school piece’ that would crown their studies.
The last, but certainly not least, cardinal point is the solitary star, the haute horlogerie timepiece that brings together many complications, the L.U.C ‘all in one’. This lovely manual-winding timekeeper is equipped with an L.U.C 4TQE four-barrelled tourbillon movement, and features hours, minutes and seconds with a power reserve of seven days. It also has a perpetual calendar with 24-hour indication, day of the week, date in a window, month, leap year, power reserve indicator, time equation, times of sunrise and sunset and precise lunar phases.
Elsewhere, at other brands as well, the ultra ‘all in one’ complication was definitely not missing in action at BaselWorld.
The Chanel J12 between maxi and mini
A seemingly large gap separating the trend towards high complication—even exaggeration—and the call for simplicity and restraint was fittingly demonstrated by Chanel. On one hand, we found a ravishing J12 with a smaller 29-mm diameter while, on the other, we stared wide-eyed at an imposing 47-mm J12 Rétrograde Mystérieuse.
These two do not reflect merely a battle of the diameters (after all, extremes in diameters can co-exist) but they also represent a ‘conceptual’ conflict between a type of watchmaking that we can qualify as ‘wearable’ and a sort of timekeeping that seeks the unusual, the astonishing, and perhaps even the strange as in the case of the J12 Rétrograde Mystérieuse.
47-MM J12 RÉTROGRADE MYSTÉRIEUSE by Chanel
Another new Chanel watch is the very successful J12 MARINE, a natural evolution in this iconic collection. Combining hi-tech ceramic with a rubber bracelet, it is equipped with a stainless steel unidirectional rotating bezel and disc in ceramic or sapphire. Featuring an automatic movement, it is also water-resistant to 300 metres.
The affable and ingenious Giulio Papi who developed this watch began his reflection with the crown. As we know, the crown has traditionally been placed on the right (which is not the most ergonomic position), drawing inspiration from the pocket watch. In the latter, the crown was generally placed at 12 o’clock but when the watch passed to the wrist, the crown was moved a quarter turn to the right. Noting that Coco Chanel herself had always sought a practical aspect for her creations as much as the purity of their forms, Papi concluded that it was necessary to move the crown directly on to the face of the watch, thereby creating a perfect circle.
With his new concept, however, he was faced with the problem of how to make the hands, especially the minute hand, move around the dial. Was a retractable hand the answer? No, too complex (even though Urwerk had done it). Papi’s solution was to design a retrograde hand that, when it approached the vertical crown placed at 15 minutes, would retreat at the ten-minute marker to reposition itself at the 20-minute position. The missing minutes were then counted down in a window by means of a disc indicating 11 to 19. The great mechanical difficulty in this system resides in the synchronization of the retrograde minute with the disc showing from 11 to 19 minutes. (For more details on this watch, see Europa Star 2/2010.)
This concept watch, or even if you consider it to be a pure exercise in style, would have assuredly been unthinkable a few years ago. But Chanel, like many other established brands, saw itself pushed towards innovation by all the young talents who—even if they have not yet found economic viability—continue nonetheless to occupy, or even sometimes squat (in other words, without paying ‘rent’) in the large and precious media spaces.
Talking pieces
A brand like Harry Winston has perfectly understood how crucial it is to occupy media space. For many years—ten to be exact—this brand has created a series of ‘talking pieces’, its now traditional Opus timekeepers. (It is not by chance that the person who initiated this policy at Harry Winston, Max Büsser, has since become one of the most visible ambassadors of the new ultra-advanced niche brands, with his own MB&F.)
For all those journalists who so eagerly waited to discover the new Opus of the year—in this case, the Opus X—Harry Winston was one of the most anticipated appointments of the show. This year, the Opus was created by Jean-François Mojon, a watchmaker and engineer who heads up Chronode, a company based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, which specializes in the development of complicated movements.
OPUS X by Jean-François Mojon for Harry Winston
Mojon designed an unusual construction based on a planetary gear train. Like in a regulator type of watch, the displays of the hours, minutes and seconds are dissociated but it is here that the similarity ends.
The indicators in the Opus X are displayed on three distinct rotating modules that, like so many variable sizes of satellites, rotate around an invisible central ‘sun’, all mounted on a frame that revolves on itself in 24 hours. Placed in orbit, these indicators are fixed at an 8° angle that follows the delicate curve of the sapphire crystal while always maintaining the same orientation (for example, the hour marker for 12 always remains at the top of the satellite) thanks to a mechanism that carries them in a centrifugal motion in the opposite direction of their trajectory around the circumference of the dial. The indicators therefore revolve continuously while remaining oriented in the same manner. In addition, a second time zone, attached directly to the 24-hour frame, is indicated by pointing to a 24-hour scale that is located on the perimeter of the dial.
Utilizing all the resources of the planetary gear train (a variant of the differential that permits the use of three shafts with different rotational speeds, greatly used in mechanics, for example in automatic gear boxes, but rarely used in watchmaking), Mojon and his team designed a 72-hour power reserve indicator at the back of the watch, in which the diameter of the satellite wheel equals the radius of the crown wheel resulting in a linear indication (based on a principle of epicycloids of La Hire’s Theorem, which states that a circle moving along the periphery of another circle of twice its radius generates a straight line on its radius.)
The spectacular spatiality of the timekeeper is accentuated by the absence of a bezel. A sandwich construction allows the sapphire crystal to be placed right up to the edge of the 46-mm case, thanks to the horns that hold it in place.
Strangely (or on the contrary, ‘logically’, one might say), we find the same idea of planetary gear trains at another very small and very young independent brand, Ressence.
Young satellites
Benoît Mintiens, Ressence creator, a young industrial designer based in Antwerp, came up with the idea of coupling a gear train composed of three orbital satellites within a minute platform to an automatic 2824 calibre. The minutes are indicated on a scale placed at the outer edge of the dial. Inside this platform, one satellite shows the hours, another the seconds and the third displays day or night.
The visual configuration of the dial changes constantly and the three satellites revolve around their invisible axis like the three moons of Saturn. From a design point of view, this Ressence watch offers superb simplicity with a clear reading of the time, greatly enhanced by a three-dimensional sapphire crystal that is placed directly on the case designed without a bezel.
RESSENCE TYPE 02B by Ressence
Beyond the stylistic choices and the ‘motorization’, we see that there is a strong resemblance between the two projects. With his first foray into the fair in Basel, Benoît Mintiens was surprised by the extraordinary welcome he received and was delighted by the solidarity that he encountered with his new colleagues (he took a small stand at the Palace). Concerned however by the enormous attention paid to his pieces by the Chinese (a horde of ‘journalists’ and photographers invaded his stand and photographed his timepieces from all angles, without his permission), Mintiens took the time to go see Harry Winston in order to verify that no patent had been infringed by either party. He said that he was very well received. Isn’t the planetary gear train as old as the study of mechanics? We wish Benoît Mintiens only great success.
At the chamfered forefront of classicism
The presence at BaselWorld of this passionate young man, who was far from being the only one, demonstrates that above and beyond the economic risks, watchmaking exercises a strong power of attraction that shows no signs of abating. What was different this year, however, was that the most remarkable new arrivals were not so much those who presented the most outrageous propositions, but rather those who took a more intrinsically traditional—nearly ‘puritanical’—approach to their creations.
One example was Laurent Ferrier, whose ultra-classic timepiece incited a great many comments. After having spent more than 37 years at one of Patek Philippe’s workbenches, this new arrival is, in fact, not so young—he was born in 1946. Nevertheless, he decided to launch his own brand, in collaboration with his son Christian, a former constructor at Roger Dubuis. To reach their goals, Laurent Ferrier also joined forces with Michel Navas and Enrico Barberini (the ‘N’ and ‘B’ in BNB, which they left in 2007 to open La Fabrique du Temps in Geneva), in order to create a watch that could be described as ‘hyper classic’, inspired directly by the grand timekeepers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
REF. LCF001-J by Laurent Ferrier
Faithful to the same philosophy as Patek Philippe, Laurent Ferrier decided to focus on the tourbillon, not to improve its decorative qualities like most other brands on the market today, but rather to improve its regulating power. For this reason, it was placed at the back of the watch.
In its design, Laurent Ferrier opted for a Straumann double balance spring, composed of two opposing springs that allow for the maintenance of the centre of gravity of the balance on its axis. The result is a working precision of the order of plus or minus two seconds per day. This tourbillon works with a 31.60-mm manual-winding movement at a frequency of 3Hz (21,600 vibrations per hour) and has a working reserve of 80 hours. Admirably finished (as a very impressed Philippe Dufour stated at BaselWorld), with its chamfered angles—technically and aesthetically more than orthodox—this timeless movement is as precise as it is robust. Placed in a 41-mm classic and perfectly designed case, it features a grand feu enamel dial with painted Roman numerals and Sagaie shaped hands. Totally in line with the grand art of traditional timekeeping.
- Part 1 of 4 – The watch industry’s big powwow
- Part 2 of 4 – Modern times
- Part 3 of 4 – Cleansing the eyes
- Part 4 of 4 – More Japanese and more global
Source: Europa Star June - July 2010 Magazine Issue
