It’s the weekend so we’ll take a different tack to our continuing Watches & Wonders Geneva stories. In fact, Watches & Wonders Geneva is not the only game in town and we dropped in on Time to Watches to check out Corum, among other brands. The temperature outside plummeted but Corum warmed us up with a great conversation about time, and their new Admiral 42 watches, and a wildly luminescent Admiral 45 model.
The Admiral 42 watches sport the 2019-introduced dial decoration called grenadier fendu, which has a historical military inspiration. This decoration is shared across all the Admiral variants this year and speaks well to current appetites and tastes. We applaud the updates and look forward to more of such options. Not that Corum will be making more watches or anything, because the brand tells us that they will actually be making fewer watches, and cutting references even more than they already have. If you love the Bubble watch, as we do, you need not worry there because it is very much in the picture.
Back in the hallowed halls of the Palexpo, I want to take you through a true aural pleasure, the new minute repeater from A. Lange & Sohne. We spoke with our old friend, Product Development Director Anthony de Haas about it, off camera, and we’ll bring you that story in May. The short story on the Richard Lange Minute Repeater is that you have to hear it for yourself. It has a classical appeal, from its three-part enamel dial to the chiming mechanism that avoids awkward pauses in the absence of quarters, that contrasts strongly with the new Odysseus watch in titanium. More on that last watch later…
For now the new minute repeater serves to connect our day, between A. Lange & Sohne and the Patek Philippe Museum. This is because Richard Lange worked on thermocompensation in the balance spring and the Museum has an excellent showcase of early thermocompensation experiments, in pocket watches, just as Richard Lange would have made. The science and culture of watchmaking cuts across time and space, and it’s nice to have a visceral experience of that here in Geneva.
Ok that’s a lot of verbiage and not a lot of watches, but we do have to save some of our coverage for the months to come. A lot of the watches at Watches & Wonders Geneva and Time to Watches for that matter, will be released throughout the year so we have to keep the excitement going for a little while. Of course, the Patek Philippe Museum can be experienced year round, but only in Geneva.
Speaking of strange connections, we managed to surprise our friends at Blancpain with a detail about the Air Command watch, which was not in their press release, and that you can read about in the latest issue of WOW, also online at LUXUO. In a bunker underneath the Blancpain boutique, we also saw a new bracelet for the Bathyscaphe and got a little handsy with the Fifty Fathoms 8 Days Tourbillon. The conversation was a little too animated and exciting so details on that bracelet and the Fifty Fathoms will have to wait. But honestly, these are the kinds of meetings and experiences that watch fairs are about. To us, they are worth a price above any watch. Okay maybe not a Van Cleef & Arpels Automaton but I digress.
Bringing the curtain down on this day of WWG was a private concert called the Sound of Colour by Hans Zimmer, courtesy of IWC. We skipped dinner to make this, and it was well worth it. Experiences like this one are also what watch fairs need, and deliver a visceral edge to the debut of the IWC and Pantone Top Gun watches.
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