Sommaire pour Winter 2021 de REVOLUTION WATCH

What I find interesting about this year is that we’ve had absolutely dazzling arrays of high watchmaking firepower — perfectly expressed by De Bethune’s Dream Watch 5 created in collaboration with musician Swizz Beatz and the incredible De Bethune × Kari Voutilainen Kind of Magic masterpiece created for my friend Luc Pettavino’s Only Watch auction — and, at the same time, extraordinary creativity and success from all across the horological spectrum, beginning with the category affectionally known as “micro-brands.” I remember seeing the image for the Jacques Bianchi JB 200 on various Instagram feeds and immediately being struck by the total originality of the watch’s design. Most dive watches are a confluence of circles, round case, round bezel, round markers, lollipop seconds hand — you get my point. I loved…

The signature feature of the Greubel Forsey GMT Sport that was released in 2019 is the Tourbillon 24 Secondes, an invention of the company that posits a fast-spinning tourbillon at a 25-degree tilt. Completing one rotation in 24 seconds as opposed to the conventional 60 seconds affords added stability, so that the tourbillon is less perturbed by life’s mad jungle of disruptive forces. Combined with what Greubel Forsey has found to be the optimum tilt to offset gravitational forces with consideration to movement height, the Tourbillon 24 Secondes punches above its weight class in a single tourbillon system. Then Greubel Forsey went on to build a most impressive watch around this innovation: a sumptuous 3D construct that brims with depth and detail. The elliptical case is not 2D as a…

Baltic is the story of a watch brand. But it’s more than that. It’s about a father and a son who, in some ways, never knew each other. Etienne Malec, the founder of Baltic — the watch world’s hottest micro-brand — is to me one of horology’s most brilliant designers and future stars. He is also remarkable in that he is not motivated by money. Otherwise, he could have done thousands of collaborations or simply launched innumerable configurations of his salmon dial HMS and Bicompax created together with Worn & Wound. Instead, he’s kept his focus relentlessly on the watches themselves. And when it comes to watches, he scrutinizes every detail. The process of my collaboration with him on what I consider to be a pretty damn stunning salmon sector…

OK, so maybe at 78.2 grams as opposed to last year’s steel watch at 110.6 grams, with a total weight savings of 32.4 grams, our latest collaboration is not the most featherweight timepiece in the world when compared, for example, to such horological exotica like Richard Mille’s RM 027. But what I can say is that it is the lightest watch with a full metal bracelet that I’ve ever strapped on. And that is what is so cool about the Airweight Cover Girl. It looks like it would possess substantial heft on the wrist until you put it on, and you have a genuine “Oh shit, that’s light” moment, and that’s the very appealing dynamic contrast between how the watch looks and how it wears. This is probably aided considerably…

It ushered in a new era by introducing the luxury watch world’s first solar-powered movement, the SolarBeat. It reintroduced an icon — a truly genderless, accessibly priced watch named the Tank Must extrapolated in three stunning monochromatic dials — that has since become one of the world’s most sought after commodities, with versions of the watch trading at up to four times its original value on the secondary market. It celebrated the centennial anniversary of its iconic Tank Cintrée with a faithful homage to the original watch that was so successful that it sold out in a matter of minutes, despite being stealth launched with zero publicity. It extended the Pasha range with a stunning chronograph model that oozed ’80s retro cool, while still bringing modern innovation in the form…

Collaborations between watchmakers and artists are not new. In recent history, it has been common to find timepieces where the know-how of a more traditional watchmaker has been combined with the artistic concept of a contemporary creator. The challenge is to give equal weight to both parties, so that the end result is a genuine and close collaboration and not mere branding exercise. What Louis Erard and Alain Silberstein have achieved in less than two years is simply amazing… and a lot of fun. There is nothing better than the great Le Triptyque collection to confirm that the LE×AS formula is the best association of art and watchmaking today. Le Triptyque consolidates the young but cheerful and robust partnership between Louis Erard and French architect-turned-watch-designer Alain Silberstein. Their first great…

Even the most casual observer or follower of Rolex collecting could not have missed the incredible surge of interest in gem-set Rolex watches over the past few years. From the shadowy sidelines of collecting, jewel-encrusted Oysters have taken center stage and become some of the most desirable watches on the market. And it’s not just Rainbow Daytonas or SARU GMT-Masters that have set auction records in recent times; diamond bezels, diamond hours and pavé dials on pretty much all models have become hot property. There is one model, however, that has always been a jewel in Rolex’s crown — the Day-Date. Even in the early days, the Day-Date was destined to be the most luxurious member of the Rolex clan. In 1965, a GMT-Master on a steel bracelet cost CHF…

The late Charles Meylan was a master watchmaker born in the Vallée de Joux who had quite the celebrated career in the Swiss watchmaking industry, having served as technical director of Favre-Leuba in Fleurier and then, Audemars Piguet. While he is no longer among us, we continue to be blessed by his legacy through the works of two of this generation’s most gifted watchmakers. These two watchmakers, masters in their own right today, were under the tutelage of Charles Meylan during the critical transition years after the end of the Quartz Crisis and before the revival of the mechanical watch. We speak of the Finnish watchmaker, presently residing in Môtiers, Switzerland, Kari Voutilainen, and the French watchmaker, Denis Flageollet, presently residing in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland — Kari Voutilainen, of course, being…

It’s a striking indicator of just how far the world of watch design has moved that George Bamford — once the exiled enfant terrible of watch customization — has an officially endorsed seat at the table with a brand like Girard-Perregaux. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. Because everything Bamford does to a watch comes from a place of profound love and passion. His input into watch design is all about highlighting the existing elements of a watch design and making them more, making them better. That’s certainly the case with the unique (literally) collaborative take on that avant-garde ’70s design, the Girard-Perregaux Casquette. Originally from an era when a digital watch costs more than a car, the Casquette featured a red LED display in a futuristic case that eschewed…

I suppose there is a certain irony that I decided to write this sprawling 11,000-word story encompassing every World Time watch Patek Philippe has ever made, precisely when my country Singapore entered yet another lockdown, bringing my plans for spending time in Europe to a crashing halt. I know I’m not alone in my burning desire to rediscover the world and all the cities in it that I love, or to remake my bonds with the people in them that I miss so much. It’s funny but the moment that our new COVID measures came into effect, I found myself retrieving my Patek Philippe reference 5131 cloisonné enamel World Time watch. As if, somehow, by losing myself in the beautifully rendered map of the Americas, Africa and Europe, I could…

Max Bill was born in 1908 in Winterthur, Switzerland. At 16, he began his training as a silversmith at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich and had two of his student works selected for exhibition at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. His personality as an artist and independent spirit had him expelled after only three years. He took his winnings from a poster contest with the Suchard chocolate manufacturer and moved to Dessau to join up with the work of the Bauhaus school. He studied for two years under the likes of Albers, Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy and Schlemmer and carried the theory of minimalist design and principles of ethical art that he maintained throughout his career. FINDING HIMSELF Max returned to Switzerland in…

Ross Povey The founder of TudorCollector.com, Ross Povey is regarded as the world’s leading expert on vintage Tudor watches. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Revolution magazine in the UK. He has contributed to influential horological publications including The Telegraph, The Rake, Watchonista and Hodinkee, and is the co-author of the book Daytona Perpetual, a celebration of the automatic Rolex Daytona released through Pucci Papaleo Editore. Ross is also an international speaker and regularly hosts watch events in the UK and Europe. Barbara Palumbo A watch and jewelry writer, Barbara Palumbo is the mastermind behind the insightful and humorous web publications Adornmentality and What’s On Her Wrist. Barbara is also a speaker, podcaster, and regularly moderates panels within the trade. She’s vocal about watches, gems, politics, all of which come in…

While the world was still in the throes of an obsession with designs stemming from the mid-1970s, in 2014 Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, along with Bvlgari and the great Jean-Christophe Babin, enacted a revolution which has become the single most important horological design innovation in the past decade — the Bvlgari Octo Finissimo. And while ostensibly you could say that it took some small inspiration from Genta’s Octo, the truth is it is a totally different and new concept. It is also a watch that can only be made by a brand willing to completely re-write the rules about how a watch is constructed. Many people believed that thinness, as embodied by Bvlgari’s seven world records in the category, was the primary focus but that would be to misunderstand Buonamassa’s concept…

In the automotive realm, the concept car is typically an outlandish design, showcasing hypothetical or untested technology — a glittering showpiece aimed at garnering headlines before eventually being watered down into staid and safe innovations implemented into regular production pieces. If you use these criteria, Cartier’s Tank Must SolarBeat is not a concept watch. What Cartier has done is take one of their most classic forms, the Tank Must — originally a 1970s interpretation of the iconic century-old design by Louis Cartier — and powered it with a next-generation engine, the SolarBeat movement. It’s a brilliant move. It’s also a move very much in keeping with Cartier’s relationship to technical innovation; it has to serve the overall design of the watch rather than be innovation for innovation’s sake. Make no…

The limited edition or LE is a phrase often bandied around when it comes to watches and yet not all LEs are equal! This year’s award for Best Limited Edition goes to a delightful watch from Chopard L.U.C. Launched in 2021 in a run of 25 pieces, the Chopard L.U.C QF Jubilee is a first for the L.U.C brand, in that its 39mm case is in steel and not a precious metal. Created as part of Chopard manufacture’s L.U.C 25th anniversary, the watch has an almost Art Deco-style, silver toned, sunburst and satin-brushed sector dial paired with a blue chapter ring and grooved subdial. Its Chevron type, rhodium-plated hour markers have small lume dots, whilst at the quarters there are lume-filled pointed baton markers. This is a seriously good-looking watch,…

Of all the timepieces that Patek Philippe has launched this year, including the incredible end-of-series olive green dial 5711 and the 5236P In-Line Perpetual Calendar, it is the new 6119 Calatrava that might possibly have been the most challenging to design. Why? Because the manual wind Calatrava with small seconds represents the dream Patek Philippe to many people and, for many generations, this has been the pathway to enter the brand. So, this watch needs to live up to all the lofty expectations we have for it. Well, the new reference 6119G and 6119R are proof positive that even when Patek makes a simple watch, it does so with acute sensitivity to detail, beauty in design and now an awesomeness in movement innovation that sets the brand in a class…

The Chopard L.U.C Flying T Twin Ladies is a pair of timepieces that was launched at the 2021 Watches & Wonders. For us at Revolution, this was a significant launch because it was the first time we bore witness to the incredible L.U.C caliber 96.24-L in a case that superbly measures in at a diameter of 35mm. Why was this important? Not too long after, it was our privilege to launch, in partnership with Chopard, the L.U.C 1860 Flying T Special, which itself has a diameter of 36.5mm and is also powered by the L.U.C caliber 96.24-L. The L.U.C caliber 96.24-L was initially launched in 2019. It features the Chopard Twin technology with two stacked barrels, micro-rotor and highly precise adjustments — particularly a 3.5Hz one-minute tourbillon with stop seconds…

People who love watches love pigeonholing them. One for diving, one for flying, one for racing your classic car around the track. In the lore of horology, these niche use cases have exceptionally clear cut and rigid criteria which, more often than not, bear no resemblance to reality. One genre of watch that is a little more opaque is the travel watch. The people who are responsible for naming watches and writing the associated press release seem to have decided that the only real constant is to have a watch with more than one time zone. Objectively this makes sense. After all, there are as many ways to travel as there are places to travel to. One man’s overland trek in a beat-up Land Cruiser is another woman’s transcontinental Gulfstream…

For many, the post-Submariner and pre-Heritage Tudor watches fall into an era of “not sure” or “wow, never saw that.” The situation wasn’t helped as the brand was withdrawn from sale in two of its biggest markets, the US and UK, for over a decade. With prices creeping ever higher, collectors who aspired to own “Snowflake” Subs, “Big Blocks” or “Monte Carlos” had to fork out significant sums for such pieces. With that in mind, keen Tudor collectors began taking an interest in the Small Block chronos and the later Submariners with Mercedes-patterned hands, and guess what? Since then, those watches have doubled, then tripled and now quadrupled in prices. The next era in Tudor’s history is very different, however. You may not have even heard of many of the…

OK, let’s just be honest here. For many years, up until August 30, 2021, Parmigiani Fleurier was a brand that, from a technical and quality perspective, I admired more than most others. And yet I felt absolutely no desire to own one of their watches. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It was not lost on me the staggering in-house horological firepower that they brought to the table. In no short order, these included the first industrially produced 30-second tourbillon; an in-house 5Hz chronograph; an inhouse 5Hz split seconds chronograph (yes, this is the base of Richard Mille’s movement for the RM 65-01); a dual time zone movement with retrograde date; a perpetual calendar with retrograde date; an insane wandering hour orbital display watch with minute repeater; an amazing GPHG-winning Hijri perpetual calendar;…

The world is clearly amid the ecstatic throes of a love affair with independent watchmaking so super heated that it makes Bernini’s famous Ecstasy of Saint Teresa seem altogether chaste in comparison. What’s the reason for all the mercury rising? Well, for one thing, several indies have proven themselves to be the best appreciable assets around. Philippe Dufour’s Simplicity went from a sub one-hundred-thousand-dollar, beautifully finished but fairly basic small sized dress watch to a one-million-dollar unicorn in the space of two years. F.P. Journe’s Souscription Tourbillons similarly exploded into the six-digit realm last year, increasing tenfold in value, causing new watches like his iconic Chronomètre à Résonance to trade at three times retail on the secondary market. To those that would listen, I’ve been championing the extraordinary watchmaking at…

What follows is a list of dials that have been featured over the years, many of which are no longer available: AGATE — A rock consisting primarily of cryptocrystalline silica, chiefly chalcedony, alternating with microgranular quartz. It is characterized by its fineness of grain and variety of color AMMONITE — The most commonly known fossil. It is the hard shell of an ancient, extinct mollusk AVENTURINE — A form of quartz, characterized by its translucency and the presence of mineral inclusions that give a shimmering or glistening effect BLOODSTONE — A cryptocrystalline mixture of quartz. The “classic” bloodstone is opaque green jasper with red inclusions of hematite CACHOLONG — A form of common opal, although it is often mistaken for agate or chalcedony CORAL — The hard skeleton of red…

Sometimes a watch just captures the collective watch-enthusiast community, in a similar way to which a country is galvanized when its national team reaches the final stages of the World Cup. So was the case when Furlan Marri announced its Kickstarter campaign to launch its 1940s-inspired steel chronograph. And what a hit it was! The initial orders were 10 times what the brand had expected, and the watches literally became social media sensations. And the greatest thing of the whole phenomenon was the price — 330 dollars! The brand was conceived by Andrea Furlan and Hamad Al Marri during the lockdown of 2020, and the watch was remarkably conceptualized, designed, tested and produced in the space of one year. This is truly a watch for everyone. Heavily influenced by the…

In 2020, German independent watchmaker Bernhard Lederer presented a prototype of his Central Impulse Chronometer which builds upon the independent double-wheel escapement invented by George Daniels, with improved geometries and the addition of a pair of remontoirs. This year, the watch was presented in its final form and represents the first in a series of watches dedicated to innovative escapements. Launched in two 25-piece editions, in either blue or silver, it features a pair of openworked seconds counters that reveal the twin escape wheels as well as the Wankel disk. The seconds hands rotate in opposite directions, offering a hint, at a glance, that it’s no ordinary time-only watch and a worthy recipient of this award. A watchmaker of immense technical and mathematical talent, Lederer is a founding member of…

There is a fan-made video on YouTube for a Miami Vice revival set in the present day, a full 40 years after the show first aired. In it, there is a scene of Don Johnson in his 60s, resplendent in a mane of white hair, suntanned and wearing his signature white suit and T-shirt. He pulls back the cloth covering his white Ferrari Testarossa. The clip cuts to him driving through Miami at night to the refrains of yes… Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” When I saw this, I leapt out of my chair and screamed “F**k Yeah!” Because the rush of nostalgia and the recognition that what was once cool will be forever cool swept powerfully through me. This is the same way I felt when I saw…

In 2019, Blancpain surprised us with the reissue of the Air Command, a limited edition, high frequency flyback chronograph. While I was impressed with the watch, there were a few things that were holding me back from declaring it as the perfect sports watch. The “old radium” Super-LumiNova, aka “fauxtina,” was my major issue with the watch. Also, the Air Command is a large watch at 42.5mm, and I felt that the comfort level was slightly diminished with the heft of a stainless steel case. Finally, the red gold winding rotor in the shape of a propeller was a bit gimmicky. Enter the 2021 Air Command. It was as though Blancpain had listened to a recording of me complaining about the 2019 reissue to Alexa. The 2021 Air Command has…

The story of Alain Silberstein — the man and the eponymous watch brand — is fascinating, even from a distance. I’m lucky to be hearing it firsthand (albeit over Zoom). Silberstein, the architect turned watch designer, has a storied, and to my mind, underappreciated place in the history of watches. Much of our conversation is spent looking backwards and ruminating on his legacy. It would be fair to think that, after some 30-odd years in and around the business of watches, Silberstein is approaching the endgame. But I’m not so sure. The increasing cadence of perfectly pitched collaborations, along with Silberstein’s own infectious energy, suggests that we can expect plenty of bold, primary colored designs for years to come. If you’re not overly familiar with the oeuvre of Silberstein, don’t…

Instagram, for many years, has been a game changer like nothing many of us had ever seen in our lifetimes. Let us think about it for a minute: What other social media outlet (that is free to download and use) has spawned multi-millionaires in the form of influencers-turned-celebrities? Many of whom, by the way, have since become clothing designers, professional models or entrepreneurs in a variety of genres across the luxury lifestyle and fashion industries. And although “influencer” can sometimes have a negative connotation (a 2019 BBC article explains in detail how the term “influencer” became a dirty word) there are those amongst us in the watch community, including enthusiasts and collectors, who simply, without even trying … influence. Many whom we might consider to be watch industry “influencers” never…

With one of the hottest trends in the watch market currently being micro-brands, there has been a rise in cool interesting watches that punch above their weight in a dense horological marketplace. No micro-brand has made a splash as colourful and playful as Studio Underd0g with watches such as Watermel0n and Mint Ch0c Chip. Founder Richard Benc has a background in corporate design and enjoyed playing around with his own ideas. He says, “I enjoyed designing products for other brands, primarily Braun, but felt slightly constrained by their sober design principles. I loved the Germanic function-first approach, but my personal design preferences were always slightly more playful.” But Covid came in 2020, and Benc’s world was forever changed. “The founding of Studio Underd0g was a bit of an accident,” he…