It’s not just the Đông Sơn drum theme of these two quite different collector’s items by watchmaker Peter Speake-Marin and pen maker Grayson Tighe that caught my eye: it was more than that, it was the actual pieces themselves inspired by the indigenous people of the Red River Delta of Vietnam.
What a beautiful theme to decorate such rare and interesting objects with.
If there’s one thing watch brands love above all else, it’s an anniversary. Celebrating important milestones for renowned products is a sure way of reconnecting the public with a manufacture’s storied past without taking too many commercial risks. In fact, watchmakers are so excited about 2017’s anniversaries that some got the ball rolling in Q4 of 2016, such as with Piaget’s 60th anniversary Altiplano collection. But you can bet that’s just the first of many commemorative pieces we’re going to see. While I’m sure we’ll see more obscure watches come out of the woodwork to celebrate birthdays over the coming weeks and months, here we have eight seriously important models hitting nice round numbers. These are the anniversaries you truly don’t want to forget.
The Gravity Alpha GT-124 Watch is designed with the cosmos as an inspiration, using two moving disc plates placed over each other and balanced to create a moving kaleidoscopic effect. Let’s take a closer look.
What if… What if I could imagine and create my dream watch, the timepiece I always dreamed of, the watch that does not exist and that I’d love to own one day. Well, if you read Monochrome on a regular basis, you already know that we’re not shy when it comes to making predictions and using Photoshop to imagine potential Rolex watches (don’t worry, we will be doing it again for Baselworld 2017…). Today though we have something a bit different. I’ve been playing around with Photoshop again but not to create a potential Rolex, but rather to imagine my dream watch, a watch that I’m pretty sure will never exist but that haunts my nights. For me, it is the A. Lange & Söhne Datograph, the ultimate chronograph by my standards and a watch that I’ve dreamed about seeing in stainless steel… What if?
For more than 2,000 years, timekeepers have appeared in art. An ancient Roman mosaic depicting Plato’s Academy shows a pedestal-mounted sundial, a 1285 manuscript illuminates a water clock, several sixteenth century Renaissance portraits by Titian feature small gilt mechanical table clocks, American folk and genre painters include shelf, banjo, and tall clocks in their domestic scenes, Marc Chagall often depicts a German wall clock from his Eastern European boyhood home, and Jamie Wyeth’s 1994 view on Monhegan Island has his teenage model Orca Bates posed next to a stately grandfather clock.
“When in doubt, add tourbillon.” This might have been the mantra for many high-end watch brands since the dawn of the new millennium, and while the tourbillon trend is tired, it is far from being dead… a point proven by the latest pre-SIHH release coming in the shape of the new Jaeger-LeCoultre Geophysic Tourbillon Universal Time.
By Roberta Naas
Last month, we brought you a look at three top Year of the Rooster watches from brands such as Chopard, Piaget and Vacheron Constantin. Now, we bring you a close up look at three more Year of the Rooster watches — as January 21 rings in the Chinese New Year. These exceptional pieces are being produced in limited editions by Ulysse Nardin and Jaquet Droz.
Ask most Speedmaster collectors what will top a Speedmaster CK2915. A Speedmaster CK2915 with a tropical dial might be the answer. Tropical dials, or chocolate dials, are very sought-after and can be found over the entire range of caliber 321 Speedmaster models and some 145.022 references. In this article we take a look at 12(!) references […]
We have been hoping this valuation of a very rare vintage Patek Philippe complicated pocket watch from the US Antiques Roadshow would be re-uploaded to their website. This is one of those finds where the timepiece has literally been sitting locked away in perfect condition. Yes, we know the clip is from 2004 but…
With SIHH 2017 just around the corner IWC has taken the covers off the revamped Da Vinci, which now returns to the familiar round form of the model’s best known iteration. Named after the Renaissance polymath, the IWC Da Vinci actually originated in the 1970s, starting with a blocky looking electronic watch powered by the Beta 21, […]