Why Only Watch 2023 Is The Craziest Only Watch Ever
And why this is one of the most colorful years yet.
If there is a single event that brings together just about everyone in the world of fine watchmaking, it’s the benefit auction known as Only Watch, which takes place once every two years to raise funds for research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The auction was founded by Luc Pettavino, whose son Paul passed away from the disease in 2016 at the age of 21.
What Is Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy?
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is one of a group of disorders of muscle tissue – specifically, of skeletal muscle tissue, the muscles responsible for moving the body. Heart muscle tissue, and muscles responsible for breathing, can also be affected. The disease is a progressive and irreversible deterioration of muscle tissue due to a mutation on the X chromosome, which prevents the muscles from making dystrophin, a protein responsible for stabilizing the structure of muscle tissue. There is currently no cure known for the disorder, which occurs almost exclusively in boys, but active and ongoing research is exploring a number of possible therapies, including gene therapy to restore the ability of the muscles to synthesize dystrophin.
Basics Of Only Watch
Only Watch offers at auction, unique pieces provided by the participating brands, and the number of brands has grown steadily through the years, from 34 for the first edition in 2005, to a total of 62 lots coming up at the next auction in Geneva, on Sunday November 5th. The auction will be handled this year by Christie’s, and partners in the past have included Phillips, and Antiquorum, who conducted the first Only Watch auction ten years ago.
This is the tenth anniversary of Only Watch. Each year there is a suggested color theme for the auction (the two previous were yellow and blue) but Only Watch offers the idea of color themes as more of a suggestion than a strict requirement, and brands are invited to interpret the color theme literally (in a dial, case material, or strap material, for instance) or simply to regard it as an inspiration.
For the tenth anniversary of Only Watch, the color theme is rainbow – an acknowledgement of the various color themes of past years; there were various approaches to the theme, including full-on literal interpretations, as well as pieces which seemed to take the theme as an invitation to head resolutely in the opposite direction. As is the case in years past, many brands take the auction as an opportunity to do things that are too technically challenging, too aesthetically radical, or too experimental for normal production and in order to draw more avid bidding, some brands produce versions of their more conventional offerings which may never go into regular production.
This year, though, and partly thanks to the rainbow theme, boy, did we ever get some eye candy.
Uncommon Complications
Quite possibly the most out-there watch this year is from Louis Vuitton, which took the basic automaton mechanism it has used in the past for watches like the Tambour Opera Automata, and given it a very unexpected interpretation.
This is just about as far from the over-the-top but still imperiously regal Opera Automata as you can get. The image of Einstein is taken from a famous photograph of the discoverer of the theory of relativity taken on Einstein’s birthday, in 1951. He had just turned 72 and was tired of being photographed all night, so when the press crowded in for one more picture, he stuck out his tongue in disdain. The picture has gone on to represent, in the minds of many, an irreverent love of whimsy but it turns out Einstein was basically five seconds away from yelling, “and you kids get off my lawn!”
The original photo was taken by UPI photographer Arthur Snasse, and as it turns out Einstein wasn’t immune to the charm of the photo – he was, fundamentally, a good sport and he actually asked for some prints to use as personal greeting cards.
In any case what the image has come to mean is as significant as the story behind it. The minutes are told off one of the electron orbitals of an atom on the lower left; the hours are read from an aperture that opens in the Great Man’s forehead (a kind of third eye) and the petals in the LV flower in his left eye narrow. And, of course, the tongue sticks out. It is always dangerous to say that anything is a first in watchmaking, but I feel safe in saying that this is the first watch with a sticking-out-the-tongue complication – la montre tirer sa langue, you might say. The whole thing is set into motion by pressing a lock of Einstein’s hair, which extends past the case and acts as a pusher to set the automata in motion.
For sheer complexity, you’d have to work very hard to beat Konstantin Chaykin’s latest Wristmon. If you’re familiar with his work, you’ll know all about the Wristmon monsters for the wrist, which have included variations on the Joker, as well as a Minotaur, Saber-Toothed Tiger, and even Minions (from Despicable Me) but Chaykin is not just a comedian – he’s made some of the most complicated astronomical and calendar watches anyone has ever made. For Only Watch, he has pulled out all the stops and given us the Stargazer Only Watch.
You like astronomical indications? You’re going to love the Stargazer. Even the Henry Graves Supercomplication would have to tip its hat to the complexity of the Stargazer, which has – well, pretty much every astronomical complication I can think of. Okay, it’s not a perpetual calendar – at least I don’t think it is – but it’s pretty much got everything else, including azimuth of sunrise and sunset, Equation of Time, and I think the only solar activity indicator I have ever seen in a mechanical watch (the Sun goes through a 22 year cycle of minimum and maximum sunspot activity, which involves the magnetic field reversing itself every 11 years, so if you’ve ever wanted a watch that tells you when you’re at greater risk of a solar storm, look no further).
Shout outs also go out to the Christiaan Van der Klauww x Frederique Constant Planetarium Tourbillon, which demonstrates Van der Klauww’s decades-long mastery of the planetarium complication, and to Girard-Perregaux, who surprised the heck out of me by showing a new version of its Constant Escapement – a true constant force escapement, not a constant force mechanism, and an extreme rarity at any point in watchmaking history, based on an escapement design first patented at Rolex, of all places.
Taste The Rainbow
Then there were the brands – and a fair number of them too – that took the rainbow theme and just leaned into it hard, and then, leaned even harder. Of all of them, I think the most blazingly polychromatic is probably the Jacob & Co. X Concepto Astronomia Revolution 4th Dimension, which is a four axis tourbillon in a 47mm case with 35 slabs of topaz, sapphire, citrine and garnet set into the background of the tourbillon, which was already a lot to look at.
This is definitely the watch that most looks like a frame from Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness, but there were other strong contenders, including the Grönefeld Principia Mandala, which reminded me vertiginously of experiments with proscribed pharmaceuticals in my college years in the 1980s, which I definitely did not conduct because I’m a law-abiding citizen. Still, this is the watch which has the biggest chance of triggering acid flashbacks, if you are susceptible.
Are you going to get an over-the-top colorful watch from Hublot when the theme is rainbows? Does a bear do bear stuff in the woods?
This is the MP-15 Takashi Murakami Tourbillon Only Watch, a collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who’s famous for his surreal, manga-inspired, sometimes dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish artwork which balances cartoonlike innocence with a sense of underlying foreboding. His Flowers are one of his best-known motifs – the smiley-face influence is obvious but the design has always reminded me of the gigantic smiley-face spaceship from the 1981 animated film, Heavy Metal.
And finally, I’m not quite sure what the MB&F x Moser collab is actually going to look like, but it looks like it might be some variation on the LM101 or Cylindrical Tourbillon collabs. What we do know is that the watch is going to contain an animated panda, playing the bongos …
… hey, I can see the music.
The Holdout: Patek Philippe
Patek Philippe has long been the undisputed king of the hill at Only Watch, with its unique pieces drawing stratospheric results, including the sale, in 2019, of a Grandmaster Chime in steel, which sold for CHF 31 million – a record for any wristwatch at any auction, ever.
Patek is promising us another complication this year, but what it will be, we don’t know, as Patek has not yet publicly announced it. The watch will be the first in a limited edition of 30 pieces, so technically not a unique piece, but Patek has said, “On the occasion of the 85th birthday of Philippe Stern in November, Patek Philippe Honorary President, Thierry Stern, President of the Geneva manufacture, has chosen to pay tribute to his father by creating an exclusive limited-edition wristwatch with his favorite grand complication, which will feature an entirely new movement. This movement, designed and produced exclusively for this tribute watch, will never be used again.”
Any guess as to what the complication is, is exactly that at this point – a guess – although on the rare occasions that he gave interviews, Philippe Stern has spoken with special emphasis on minute repeaters, as for instance in an interview with PuristSPro.com in 2007, which was originally published in iW Magazine. (Stern joked at one point that one of the reasons Patek was working on improving repeater volume was because hearing acuity diminishes with age, he wasn’t getting any younger, and he still listened to every Patek repeater before allowing it to leave the factory). On the other hand, Philippe Stern also wore a Patek observatory tourbillon as his own personal watch for many years. But given Patek’s long history of making chiming complications, I think some sort of repeater is the way to bet.
Les Montres Monochrome
The rainbow color theme was catnip to a lot of participating brands, but not all of them. However, even without splashes of color, you can obviously have a compelling offering and two of our favorites at The 1916 Company, De Bethune and F. P. Journe, made the most of doing the least with color. F. P. Journe is offering the Chronomètre Bleu Furtif, with a tantalum case and bracelet, which nods subtly to the rainbow theme with a deep blue dial contrasting with a bright orange seconds hand – bracketing both ends of the visible light spectrum, so there’s sort of a rainbow there by inference.
The “furtif” part is the moonphase display and power reserve hidden on the back, which are both framed by the unusual architecture of a new movement, the caliber 1522, in rose gold.
De Bethune’s entry is the DW Seeking Perfect For Only Watch, whose name references the documentary film of the same name.
This is about as far from an overtly colorful watch as you can get but it has a kind of color of its own. The case was made from iron ore and smelted, forged, and finished entirely by hand, by Denis Flageollet, and the case of the Only Watch Seeking Perfect is the same case you see Flageollet creating in the film. While there is no flare of variegated color as there is in some of the other Only Watch pieces this year, there is a feeling, as with the Journe, of color of another kind – the play of light being broken into a narrow but almost infinitely varied bandwidth, in the minute crystalline fibers of hand-forged steel.
Only Watch is a unique event on the watch calendar for a number of reasons. The results tend to draw a lot of attention from the watch press (and the general luxury press, too, as far as that goes) because it’s not unusual for records to be set at Only Watch, and it’s also not unusual for watches to out-perform their estimates for a number of reasons. Collectors, seasoned and otherwise, as well as watch enthusiasts in general, sometimes wonder what the auction tells us about the larger market for new, pre-owned, and vintage watches and the answer is pretty complicated. Any watch won at Only Watch is a charitable donation and it’s not unusual moreover for brands to bid on their own watches (this isn’t an uncommon practice at watch auctions in general) so what you’re seeing at Only Watch is not exactly representative of the market. Still, it’s probably not a coincidence that the record-setting watch of all time is a Patek – even if a brand is bidding on its own watch it takes deep pockets to produce a resounding result, so you have to have those deep pockets and you also have to have the reputation and history that justifies making a record-hitting bid in the first place.
What Only Watch does in terms of raising research funds for a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy outshines the value of any watch submitted and while it’d be a fine thing if there were more concrete support of such initiatives from the luxury industry in general, the millions raised by Only Watch stand a good chance of actually making a difference – a life-saving difference – in people’s lives. It’s always nice to have a watch that matters and an Only Watch unique piece matters in a way that watches usually don’t. As Luc Pettavino says:
“One cannot get bored of Only Watch. We are preparing the 10th edition, yet, all participating brands, partners, media, collectors, donators, supporters, and us, the organizers feel joy and excitement because we know for a fact that it is going to be once again an everestic festive moment of creativity where generosities will meet other generosities to do good to others in need and by doing so, to ourselves.
“I am grateful for all of us to be able to create this together and have such a great impact. We also get to show the world it’s possible to organize great rallies for great causes when people’s hearts and minds are in the right place.”
See all the Only Watch catalogues from 2005 up to the present right here.