Watch Dandy

While Heuer’s ties to motor racing are well known, TAG Heuer played on its less well known past connections with the sport of boxing to launch a watch celebrating the legendary Muhammed Ali. This commemoration comes just months after the boxer’s death, yet this 43mm piece demonstrates that a lot of attention was put into its development, blending vintage traits into a more modern platform. What could simply have been a good marketing coup turns out to be a nicely crafted watch, which as a bonus, comes in at a competitive $3,000 price point.

One of the wonderful things about watch collecting is that there are an incredible number of different levels on which you can go at it. Sure, we all spend a lot of time hearing about a lot of the same things, from a lot of the same auction results, to a lot of coverage of brands that because of their sheer size and industry influence are news (like Cartier, Rolex, Omega, and TAG Heuer). But at the same time, there are pockets of almost pure scholarship here and there, where collectors are motivated not by brand image or the hope of making a solid investment, but by pure enthusiasm.

Chopard has unveiled its first minute repeating watch, and the manufacture hasn’t gone for the least complicated design. The Full Strike is a crown operated minute repeater (it strikes the hours, quarters and minutes) with sapphire gongs and a slew of patents on security devices to make sure the watch does not break if it is mishandled. Lucky for us, we received a demonstration from its creators during a recent visit to the Chopard manufacture (which is celebrating 20 years in 2016), and we were there just in time to shoot a video at 12:59. What were the odds.