Watch Dandy

While you were catching up on your weekend reading, the first ever dedicated ladies’ watch awards took place in London. The Eve’s Watch Awards are dedicated to the “celebration” of women’s watches and new innovations released each year within that category. As you are well aware I am sure, there are plenty of women’s watches to choose from (mostly quartz and diamond-encrusted) so the watches are judged mostly on design and aesthetics, which is incredibly important in my opinion. With the nominees we saw a lot of familiar faces and the winners came as no surprise to me. Here are a few noteworthy highlights.

As part of celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Fleurier manufacture, Chopard decided to surprise us with two new COSC-certified travel companions in the L.U.C line, the Time Traveler One and the GMT One. This collection is named in tribute to Louis-Ulysse Chopard, the company’s founder, and reserved for pieces entirely designed and manufactured in-house. We had the opportunity to see them in the metal last week and have tons of live pictures and our first impressions of both models. Spoiler alert: We were mightily impressed.

Well, it appears that everyone is jumping on the smartwatch bandwagon, including well-known fashion brand Michael Kors. This should come as no surprise after Fossil Group purchased Misfit, a wearable technology company, for $260 million in November 2015. And what else does Fossil Group own? The licensing rights to manufacture and sell Michael Kors watches, that’s what. They sure aren’t fine watchmaking, but these watches are damn popular and pretty impossible to ignore.

One of the most popular, as well as the most useful, of all A. Lange & Söhne watches is the Lange 1 Time Zone, which was first introduced in 2005, and is probably one of the most luxurious dual timezone watches in the world (if not the most). One of the most interesting features of the Lange 1 Time Zone is that the view through the case-back is an opportunity to see something that you actually no longer see in the Lange 1 itself, since the introduction of the new model Lange 1 in 2015: a movement with a close resemblance to the idiosyncratic architecture of the original Lange 1 caliber L901.1, with its two island-like cut-outs in the three-quarter plate and screw balance wheel. In this latest limited edition model, the watch is offered for the first time in honey gold – Lange’s proprietary gold alloy that strikes a middle ground between pink and yellow gold; the effect is a bit less overtly eye-catching than yellow gold, and with less of the obvious coppery tints of conventional pink gold alloys. It’s a beauty.