Is This The Era Of The Non-Round Watch?
Never before in the history of the wristwatch has time been less circular.
It is the truism of truisms in watchmaking that a round watch is all other things being equal, likelier to to appeal than a non-round watch, and yet, over the last three or so decades a groundswell has been building of non-round watches that are reaching a wider and wider audience. To understand why, let’s take a quick look at why for so much of the history of watchmaking it was a given that a watch would be round.
Why are so many watches round?
There are make no mistake, some very deep reasons that watches and clocks have round dials and, in watchmaking, round cases. The oldest and most primal reason is probably that the motions of the heavenly bodies, which were our first clocks, are circular and when we began to encode those motions in machinery, we did so – logically enough – with round gears (there are of course, plenty of gears that are not round but early inventors would have had to be either unrealistically imaginative or really masochistic or both). Circular gears naturally lead to hands running in circular pathways, and from this, circular cases naturally follow.
The second reason is perhaps less philosophical and more practical. As timepieces made the transition to pocket watches, round shapes simply lent themselves better to fitting in a waistcoat or vest pocket. A round watch slides in and out more easily (and is easier to construct) than something more overtly geometric and although there were in some cases, pocket watches made with octagonal, hexagonal, and even rectangular and triangular shapes, round watches were overwhelmingly favored and became the default geometry of the watch. In fact in the entire production of Breguet during his lifetime (to pick just one example) I don’t think there is a single non-round watch.
Early Cartier: The King Of Non-Round Watch Designs
Oddly enough, although we think of round cases as the classic wristwatch shape (which they are, taken by numbers produced, certainly) it was the advent of the wristwatch that really took non-round cases mainstream.
Take a look to take just one example, at the watches produced under the supervision of Louis Cartier, starting at the beginning of the 20th century and through the 1930s. Now, these are some of the great classic watch designs of all time and those designs helped establish the fundamental design language of modern watchmaking which is with us even today, and there are – and given the ubiquity of round cases in watchmaking, almost shocking – not a single purely round watch design among them. We’ve got the Tank, the Tonneau, the Santos, the Tortue, the Baignoire, the Cloche, and then all the variations on the Tank including the Normale, the Louis Cartier, the Chinoise, variants like the à Guichet, and the Allongée and all of these are absolute classics of modern watch design, without a single circle among them.
You could in fact go as far as to say that the whole success of Cartier as a watchmaker stems from the fact that its watches were almost entirely not round. This set them apart from the early generation of wristwatches, many of which were adopted from pocket watches and which simply had round pocket watch cases with lugs soldered on. A real wristwatch, the feeling seems to have been, which is to say a watch specifically made for the wrist and not adopted from a pocket watch, would be one that rejected the tyranny of the circle in search of a more specific and idiosyncratic identity.
The Non-Round Watch: Modern Icons
Looking to more recent watch design, it seems clear that while the round watch clearly is not going anywhere, the non round watch is having something of a moment, if you can call a phenomenon that began in the 1970s a moment. I pick that decade because it’s the decade that saw the launch of two of the most iconic of all modern watches. The Royal Oak and the Nautilus are two of the mostly fervently desired and hotly pursued watches of all time and although we seem to have bid a collective farewell to the hype watch era, those two timepieces absolutely defined it, and of course, they are neither of them round.
The list goes on and on. Cartier for instance, has been enjoying a floruit like nothing it’s had since the 1920s and it is almost entirely based on non round watches – in fact, as with the 1920s I would say entirely based on non round watches, including relaunches, in the Privée Collection, of the Asymmetrique, Tank Normale, and more recently, a very appealing skeletonized version of the Santos Dumont. And there’s no need to dwell on the enormous amount of attention that the Crash has been attracting in the last few years.
Both Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe continue to hold enthusiasts spellbound with non-round watch designs with their original roots in the 1970s. Key independents which have defined the modern world of independent horology, like URWERK and MB&F, have made non-round watches if not the only shape used, then certainly a noticeable minority. The Reverso is another example … and the list could go on and on.
One of the most notable examples of making a success out of non-round watch cases is Richard Mille. There have been one or two round case Richard Mille watches but they are so rare in RM’s catalogs as to almost look like aberrations when they appear, and the tonneau case at RM is one of the signature elements of Mille’s designs since the very beginning. The round case will always be with us, but if there is one lesson to take away from the last few decades of horology, it’s that round is by no means synonymous with success.