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A Purely Personal Take on Watches & Wonders 2023

Refreshes, Reboots and Disruptions from Rolex

Jack Forster9 Min ReadMar 30 2023

Watches and Wonders 2023 is the last remaining instance of a kind of event that used to define the watch industry: The trade show where, in years past, retailers and journalists would see, usually for the first time, the newest timepieces across the board from the watch industry. Watch trade shows seemed to be an endangered species after BaselWorld, which in one form or another had been around for over 100 years and took place for the last time in 2019, leaving only Watches And Wonders (itself a rebranding of the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, or SIHH) to fill the gap. However, Watches and Wonders seems to be flourishing; this year, there were close to 50 exhibitors. With industry powerhouses Rolex and Patek Philippe anchoring the show, it would seem news of the death of watch trade shows is, if not greatly exaggerated, then at least premature.

Showing at a trade show means sharing airtime with lots of other brands all vying for attention, but as always there were announcements and debuts which stood out from the rest. Here are a handful of new releases that managed, in one way or another, to stand out from the (very) crowded lineup in Geneva this week.

Watch Most Likely To Be Worn By Tony Soprano After Finishing Therapy: The Rolex Day-Date 36 Emoji

Rolex has a well-deserved reputation as a company which is devoted to, by and large, incremental and often technically motivated upgrades to existing product lines which in many cases have been around for decades — the Submariner, GMT Master II and Daytona are all cases in point, as is, of course, the Day-Date. The Day-Date exists to show the day and the date but more importantly, it exists to confirm to its owner that they are a force to be reckoned with in this world and that they have achieved a certain level of success they’re not shy about displaying publicly.

Zoom InRolex Day-Date Emoji

Which is why the Day-Date Emoji Puzzle Dial watch seems to have dramatically taken over the chatter about Rolex new releases in particular, and WWG new releases in general. Rolex likes to take the enthusiast community by surprise every once in a while (the 50th Anniversary Daytona was a case in point). But in many years of covering Rolex I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as out there as this version of the Day-Date; an off-catalog watch, which doesn’t seem to even have an official name from Rolex to set it apart from the other Day-Date watches.

It may seem like a total subversion of everything that the Day-Date symbolizes (well, that’s because it kind of is a total subversion of everything that the Day-Date symbolizes) but after puzzling (haha) over this one for several days, I have come to the conclusion that it’s just fine. Pretty much every luxury mechanical watch exists to make us feel like we’re a part of some narrative (I’m a pilot! I’m a diver! I’m a mid-level mafioso!) and why shouldn’t there be a Day-Date that’s a happy-go-lucky take on making you feel like you’ve reached a happy place where the Day and the Date are meaningless, and every turn of the Earth just means another reason to meet the day with joy in your heart? Richard Mille did an emoji watch last year but if you ask me, this is a much deeper cut — to take a watch as conservative and classic an expression of what luxury Swiss watchmaking means as the Day-Date, and turn it into a piece of joyous revisionism, makes the Emoji Puzzle Day Date a watch that deserves to be the talk of the town.

Watch Most Likely To Make You Agonize Over Platinum Vs. Gold: The Tank Normale

This was an easy one; without question, the Cartier Tank “Normale” which has just been released as part of the Privé collection. Periodically the watch industry seems to go through spasms of wanting to shed itself of the burdens of the past and show stuff that’s transgressive or revolutionary or unprecedented, which is fine, but a lot of time what we end up getting is novelty for its own sake at best, and a sad disconnect of a brand from what makes it really unique and special at worst. I’m a big fan of the idea that if you’re a legacy brand, like Cartier, you could do a lot worse than have watches in your collection which are a tangible collection to the past. Creating and nurturing that connection is the whole point of the Privé collection and while I’m still holding out for a Privé re-issue of the Tank à Guichets, boy, I’m not at all upset about the Normale.

Zoom InCartier Tank Normal on Bracelet

The hardest decision when it comes to the Normale, honestly, is figuring out whether to go for gold on gold, or platinum on platinum — not that there’s anything wrong with the watch on a strap but if you’re going for the kind of seamlessly commingled discretion and opulence which, at its best, is Cartier’s stock in trade, a matching precious metal bracelet is the way to go (I’m Team Platinum personally).

Watch That Gets A Reboot Right: The IWC Ingenieur 40MM

Look, there’s nobody more inclined than I am to prefer re-issues of legacy designs to hew as close as possible to the original design, and especially when it comes to anything by Gérald Genta, adherence to the original design codes is not just a question of slavish imitation — it’s actually kind of the whole point.

Zoom InIWC Ingenieur

That said, I do not have it in me to be upset about the crown guards on the new Ingenieur 40mm from IWC, for all that they were not present on Genta’s original re-design of the Ingenieur from 1976. In just about every other respect, the new Ingenieur 40mm ticks (for me anyway) all the boxes. The case dimensions (40mm x 10.8mm) sound right on for an integrated bracelet sports watch, the dial patterns are a great shout-out to the original SL without being an exact copy-paste, and if you are gonna put out a (semi-)homage to the Ingeneiur SL, putting the movement inside a soft iron case and under a soft iron dial is the way to go. Is it an archaic solution to making an antimagnetic watch? Ok, so it is. You know what, a mechanical watch of any kind is an archaic solution. If we weren’t into doing things the old fashioned way, would we be into watches at all?

The Smart Is Sexy Watch Of WWG 2023: The Chanel J12 Cybernetic

You know, if there is a single watch brand — or hell, brand period — that I think does not get enough credit for possessing tons of imagination, as well as the cojones to put out-there designs into actual production, it’s Chanel. I’m a J12 fan, I’m a J12 owner, I happen to like the J12 and I wear mine, if not often, then at least reasonably frequently and, quite honestly, it’s a hoot to have on (I have had quote friends unquote tell me that they think that the J12 on my wrist is insufficiently masculine and to them I say, ‘I wasn’t wearing it for you’). Anyway, this year at Watches and Wonders we got quite a lot of amazing stuff from Chanel but my favorite piece from them by far this year is the J12 “Cybernetic.”

Zoom InChanel J12

This amazing piece takes the classic round shape of a watch and shatters it with pixels, which is as good a metaphor for the collapse of a classical worldview in the face of the digital world as I have ever seen, and it’s one of the best uses of ceramic for design purposes I think I’ve seen in 20 years. Everyone loves to talk about ceramic as a technical material but Chanel is almost alone in exploring what it means to watch design. The “ChatGPT is destroying the world of inter-human civil discourse,” watch of 2023.

The Watch Enthusiasts Have Been Waiting For Forever: The Grand Seiko Tentagraph

The second to last watch on my list is the Tentagraph from Grand Seiko. Grand Seiko has had chronographs in the past but they’ve all been Spring Drive and there is nothing wrong with Spring Drive chronographs. In fact, there is a lot right. But the enthusiast community that has loved and supported Grand Seiko for many years has always wondered when we would get an honest to goodness mechanical chronograph — automatic for choice but really anything purely mechanical would do — from GS. This year we got it.

Zoom InGrand Seiko Tentagraph

The Tentagraph is a high beat (36,000vph, just like the El Primero) chronograph built on the caliber 9SA5, which in addition to a high frequency escapement also uses Seiko’s dual impulse escapement. I wish, along with a lot of the Grand Seiko faithful, that we’d gotten an integrated chronograph rather than a module (hand-wound would have been nice) but as a first outing from GS, you could do a lot worse than a high-beat automatic chronograph with an advanced escapement.

The Talking Piece No One is Talking About: The Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Les Cabinotiers “Dual Moon”

My last pick, this guy. You would think that a grand complication watch from the oldest brand still in the business would have been the main talking point of Watches and Wonders 2023. And how wrong you would be. Yeah it is not groundbreaking technically — the Vacheron caliber 2755 has been around for a while, and there aren’t any novel implementations of classic complications anywhere in the watch. But it is, after all, a very beautiful example of how you can take classic complications and give them a fresh expression. We’ve got a perpetual calendar, double moonphase (for the northern and southern hemispheres) a minute repeater and, on the back, a planispheric star chart (plus, also on the back so as not to clutter up the dial, a one minute tourbillon). It’s as beautiful an example of refreshing the classic idiom of Grande Complication watches as I have seen or am likely to see this year. And mastery of the classic repertoire is not something to be taken likely — “attention must be paid.”

Zoom InVC Cabinotiers