LIST: 4 awesome everyday watches from SIHH 2019 that you can actually afford
As far as international watch fairs go, SIHH is great. If highly complex, mind-blowing timepieces are your jam, it’s the one for you. After all, it’s the Haute Horlogerie fair. But things get a touch trickier if you (like I suspect many of our readers) are into simpler fare, more suitable for daily duty. Never fear though, for amidst the tourbillons and astronomical complications there’s some incredible value to be had. Like these four watches … Montblanc Heritage Automatic Montblanc’s revamped Heritage collection was one of the real winners from SIHH, a collection oozing in stylish nostalgia and charm. No small part of that charm is due to the complex, domed dials with sophisticated finishes and mix of printed and applied details. And while this collection encompasses high-end chronographs, a GMT and a Day-Date, I’m quite smitten by this 40mm time-only offering with the warm, coppery toned salmon dial. From 2150 euro. IWC Pilot’s Watch Automatic Spitfire IWC’s Pilot’s line is — unsurprisingly, given its utilitarian and attractive style — one of the brand’s strongest performers, and this year saw a crop of the best high-flying releases in a good while. Amidst the bold new materials and aviation-inspired complications, it was the…
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Grand Seiko has, in the lead-up to Baselworld, just announced a brand new movement for the Elegance Collection, four new manually wound, slender watches (three of them limited editions) that look very promising indeed. First things first, this collection is powered by a new manually wound caliber, the 9S63, the brand’s first in eight years. The basics of this hand-wound movement are that it’s got a reserve of 72 hours, and accurate to within +5/-3 seconds a day. More importantly, this movement opens up new design possibilities for Grand Seiko, with its current layout of balanced small seconds at nine and power reserve at three. The manual factor also allows for slimmer watches, with these new offerings coming in at 11.6mm. The cases are classic Grand Seiko: 39mm across and fairly slender. With narrow and powerful lugs, it possesses design codes that should be instantly familiar to lovers of Grand Seiko. The crown is screw-down (an interesting move on a manual watch), though you do only have to wind it every three days. Water resistance is 3 bar. For now, the watch is offered in steel (SBGK005), yellow gold (SBGK006) and rose gold (SBGK002 and SBGK004). The dials are, frankly,…
Adding variety in the world of ultra-thin watchmaking is tricky. Because in this space, additional complications typically equals extra thickness — and that defeats the aim of the exercise. So instead of working on altering the mechanics, you change the aesthetics, which is just what Piaget has done here with these new additions to the Altiplano family. Before we take a closer look at those spectacular dials, a quick recap on this particular Altiplano. At 40mm across, and with a very simple, traditional round case, this watch is dressy by design. The incredible thinness of 6.5mm makes it almost unimaginable that this watch would perform any other function. The movement is quite special, the 1203P is 3mm wide, handsome, and powered by a micro-rotor that gives it up to 44 hours of go. But back to those dials. They’re incredibly slender slices of meteorite, cut to reveal the distinctive and unique crystalline structure, formed over thousands of years of floating silently through space … which is wild, if you actually think about it. Out-of-this-world origin story aside, the physical look of these dials is strong (even taking that white date window into account). The patterns in the iron-nickel heavy material…