Rediscovering A Revolution: Unconventional Watch Design

Tastes in watches currently heavily favor conservative, and even reactionary, design. Classics of course will always be classics for a reason but I can’t remember a time in the last twenty years, when the focus among enthusiasts and collectors was so strongly on watches that may in themselves offer a great deal, but which largely follow a design playbook codified in the 1950s and early 1960s, with the exception of course of some of the integrated bracelet stainless steel sports watches of the mid-1970s.

This can most clearly be seen in the numbers of so-called homage watches that are being produced – both by brands who created the additional models, and others – which resurrect designs that sometimes have been out of production for decades. There are any number of reasons why this is happening – two of them are the increase almost across the board in watch prices, which tends to encourage looking at watches from a value retention perspective, as well as the surge in vintage watch collecting starting in around 2015, which conditioned people’s tastes to prefer designs endorsed by nostalgia. Combine that with the fact that collecting vintage has increasingly become an obvious minefield for the unwary, capable of ensnaring even the most observant, and you get both a desire for the reassurance of the familiar and a distrust of anything out of the ordinary.

Not your grandad’s Rotonde de Cartier.

I do wonder however if we might at some point see the pendulum start to swing in the other direction. On the one hand, I take a lot of joy in the fact that interest in real horological content is beginning to outstrip interest in hype watches, or at least, gain ground – for many years evaluating traditional fine movement finishing, for instance, was something of a niche interest but nowadays it has, so to speak, become outsider knowledge that understanding traditional hand-finishing is insider knowledge. But I wonder if in focusing on the glories of tradition we’re not missing out.

DB25 GMT Starry Varius

Classical watchmaking is full of pleasures, but while it takes shokunin-like intensity of focus to master it, in the same way that even perfect Edomae sushi would get a little old if you had to eat it every day (or would it) it’s nice to have some diversity in the room. Outside of the world of homage watches, vintage designs, vintage inspired designs, actual vintage watches, and timeless classics (of which we seem to have a plethora these day, which makes you wonder – if everything is a classic, nothing is a classic) there are also a plethora of watches that represent not only a willingness to consider new design ideas, but an actual joy in transgressing the tyranny of the classical as well.

Richard Mille RM60 Automatic winding movement with hours, minutes, running seconds at 3 o’clock, oversize date, month, annual calendar, flyback chronograph with central seconds counter and 60-minute countdown timer at 9 o’clock, 24-hour totaliser at 6 o’clock, UTC function and variable-geometry rotor.

The drive to break free of classical design constraints probably goes back to the first wave of out-there independent watchmakers of the 1990s, and by 2005 the field was full of exuberant imagination – De Bethune, MB&F, Urwerk, and the Harry Winston Opus series (not all of which necessarily worked reliably, but that was hardly the point) were all pioneers in exploring just how far you could push both design and mechanics. MB&F, De Bethune, and Richard Mille were all leaders in this respect. The notion of taking the idea of a watch and seeing how far you could push it, was something really new in the early 2000s. It was not the first time in the history of watchmaking that watches have tried to be serious entertainment as well as serious engineering, but the last time it happened, it was the early 19th century, just before the achievement of real precision timekeeping made things like automata and striking jacks seem out of date.

I’m not saying that we should necessarily find absolute value in so-called avant-garde watchmaking, but on the other hand I don’t think we should necessarily find absolute value in traditional watchmaking and classical craftsmanship either. This gets into the somewhat complicated territory of evaluating the value of a watch. Things like the number of person hours it takes to bevel a tourbillon bridge, or to polish a flank or produce a beautifully rounded bevel on a bridge (which is what has made Philippe Dufour famous – among other things) are easier to evaluate. What’s a little harder, is deciding how much value to place on good design – or, no, let us say, interesting design.

As a case in point, let’s take the MB&F HM7 Aquapod. This watch is not so much a dive watch as it is a meditation filtered through the mind of someone obsessed with Jules Verne, of a dive watch. It is not even, by specs, a dive watch in any official way – it is 50M water resistant, which is 50M less than you need to meet the minimum requirements for a diver’s watch per ISO 6425. But it is much, much more interesting than about 99.9% of nominal dive watches out there and if the purpose of a watch is to take you a little outside yourself, and let you feel as if you are part of a dreamworld made partly real in the form of a watch, it’s just about the best diver’s watch there is.

Every watch has a little bit of a dreamworld associated with it and some of the most interesting watches lean hard into that dream. You don’t hate Captain America for having hypetrophy of the pectoralis major and minor muscles that would have made Schwarzenegger jealous even in his prime; instead, you understand that what you are seeing is a deep and powerful expression of strength that transcends physical strength, and that embodies what the reedlike Steve Rogers before the Vita Rays said: “I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t like bullies.” Thus it is with watches like the Richard Mille RM60. They are not watches at all, in the ordinary sense – instead, they are something like the Portkeys from the Harry Potter universe; seemingly inanimate objects that when touched, may sweep you along to a place entirely unexpected and unsuspected.

The Journey Begins