Flower Power: Vacheron Constantin’s Métiers d’Art Florilège

For the first time since it launched its limited edition Métiers d’Art collection, Vacheron Constantin dedicated this year’s series to the fairer sex. The Métiers d’Art Florilège trilogy presents three designs, each referencing a beautifully rendered botanical illustration from Robert John Thornton’s The Temple of Flora, published in 1799. The reference book, featuring artwork by the top botanical illustrators and painters of the time, remains a valued reference even more than two centuries later. Three of the book’s 90 plates—the strelitzia, the white lily, and the China Limodoron—have been reproduced on watch dials using the ancient decorative crafts of enameling, guilloché engraving, and gem setting. Vacheron Constantin will produce 20 pieces of each variation with round diamonds, plus another five pieces, designated for Vacheron Constantin boutiques, set with baguette diamonds. Along with its in-house team of craftspeople, Vacheron Constantin commissioned independent artisan Anita Porchet, who is regarded as Switzerland’s most revered enamellist. Porchet signs each dial with her initials.

Leading Ladies: Glashütte Original Debuts Its Pavonina Collection

At the 63rd Berlinale International Film Festival last February, film critics showered praise on Juliette Binoche and Paulina García for their performances, while off-screen, event sponsor Glashütte Original debuted its new leading lady, the Pavonina watch collection. German celebrities including Iris Berben, Natalia Wörner, and Katarina Witt  attended Pavonina’s premiere on February 11 at the Direktorenhaus, a historic building that was transformed into a hip event venue for Berlin’s design and art scene.

Girard-Perregaux Builds A Le Corbusier Watch Trilogy

Girard-Perregaux’s Le Corbusier Trilogy pays tribute to the pioneer of modern architecture and design who shares the brand’s hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Three Vintage 1945 watches—each limited to five pieces—are named for La Chaux-de-Fonds, Paris, and Marseille, all significant cities in Le Corbusier’s personal history. The designs draw upon the work and aesthetic principles of the famed architect who was a contemporary of Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.

Solid Oak: Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Turns 40

When Audemars Piguet unveiled the first Royal Oak at the Baselworld fair in 1972, the late Gerald Genta’s visionary design met with consternation. “It was a bit of a shock for the establishment,” explains the brand’s design director, Octavio Garcia, who references the watch’s massive size, integrated bracelet, sporty sensibility, and extra-flat profile. “On top of all that, it was made of steel and finished like a noble material.” It was also royally priced. The brand expected the model to be a limited edition of a few hundred pieces, but the Italian market quickly embraced the modern design, others followed, and it was put into production. This year, the brand’s flagship collection celebrates its 40th anniversary with eight new models and a commemorative exhibition that will run from March 21 through 24, 2012, in New York City, after which it will travel to Milan, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. Audemars tapped artists Sebastien Leon Agneessens, Quayola, and Dan Holdsworth to create an original Royal Oak experience using design, photography, sound, and film to transport visitors to the home of Audemars Piguet in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux, the country’s haute horlogerie capital. The diplay will showcase dozens of significant Royal Oaks, including the one that started it all: The Jumbo.

Métiers of Time: Vacheron Constantin’s Les Univers Infinis

“The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure,” declared Maurits Cornelis Escher, the celebrated 20th-century Dutch graphic artist. Escher’s enigmatic prints often bend the conventional rules of visual perception with mirror imagery and repetitive interlocking motifs known as tessellations. In its ongoing pursuit to advance watchmaking’s centuries-old métiers d’art for the modern era, Geneva watchmaker Vacheron Constantin approached the Escher Foundation and gained the rights to reinterpret Escher’s works for its latest Métiers d’Art series, Les Univers Infinis.

Legacy Pledge: MB&F’s LM1

What’s this? Has Max Büsser gone conventional on us? Today’s launch of the LM1, the first MB&F Legacy Machine, took the watch world by surprise not with its radical timekeeping vision, but rather with its traditional, round case. Following the sci-fi HM4 and HM3, expectations were no doubt pinned on yet an even more fantastical contraption. Not this time, responded Büsser, who decided to directly reference watchmaking history instead of conjuring up another futuristic machine. His impetus for the new piece arose from thinking more about time travel à la Jules Verne rather than space travel à la Battlestar Galactica. He asked himself what kind of watch would he create if he were born 100 years earlier in 1867 rather than in 1967. Naturally, a round pocket watch was the inspirational starting point. But, while the LM1 pays tribute to watchmaking’s golden age of invention from 1780 to 1870, it still breaks some rules so as not to disappoint MB&F’s renegade fans.

Fashionably On Time: The Dior VIII Grand Bal Collection

Dior VIII Grand Bal Pleated

Designer watch brands often eschew substance for style, but at Dior, haute couture and haute horology beautifully reinforce each other. Perhaps no other collection expresses the essence of Dior’s fashionable approach to mechanical watchmaking than this year’s Dior VIII Grand Bal, a special series within the slick new black ceramic Dior VIII collection. Five different designs each represent a fabric or decorative technique used in couture fashion.

Star Power: IWC’s Portuguese Sidérale Scafusia

A decade ago, IWC enlisted its engineers and watchmakers to create a constant force tourbillon watch as a statement of the brand’s horological prowess. The Portuguese Sidérale Scafusia, unveiled last summer, embodies that goal and more. With its astronomical complications as well as a perpetual calendar, this approximately $840,000, made-to-order watch is the most complex timepiece IWC has ever built.

All Wound Up: New Automatic Movements Generate Excitement

Cartier Rotonde de Cartier Astroregulateur

This is an English translation of a story that ran in Cronos magazine in Mexico in summer 2011

Though he invented the rotating oscillating weight for pocket watches around 1770, Abraham Louis Perrelet’s concept for an automatic watch that harnesses energy from the wearer was much better suited for wristwatches, which followed more than a century later. John Harwood, a watch repairer from the Isle of Man, filed a patent for a bumper winding system in 1923, but it was Rolex that set the benchmark with 1930’s Oyster Perpetual wound by a semi-circular weight that rotated 360 degrees. “Rolex was the first to introduce 360-degree rotation, and that was probably the biggest 20th-century invention,” says John Reardon Senior Vice President and Head of Sotheby’s Watch & Clock department in New York City. “After that, there wasn’t a big bump until Patek Philippe’s 12-600 caliber and the Ref. 2526 in 1954. That was a game changer because it was the first time a very high-end company offered an automatic system. The mythology is that Patek had to wait for Rolex’s patent to expire.” While the basic premise of the automatic winding system remains the same—to generate energy from the wearer’s arm motions—watchmakers recently have been working to advance these systems with heightened efficiency, adjustable speed settings, bi-directional systems, and even peripheral oscillators that allow a full view of the movement through the case back.

Literary Gems: Van Cleef & Arpels’ Les Voyages Extraordinaires

Science fiction and jewelry watches are unlikely partners; yet, this odd pairing did not daunt the designers at Van Cleef & Arpels. Following its Jules-Verne-inspired Les Voyages Extraordinaires high-jewelry collection, which debuted in fall 2010, the Paris house has unveiled a prolific series of exquisite art watches based on Verne’s books: Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, A Journey to the Center of the Earth and From the Earth to the Moon. With such fertile raw materials to draw upon, Van Cleef & Arpels has produced an array of timepieces that are as fantastical as Verne’s 19th-century visions of travel to both earthly and other-worldly destinations. “In drawing on the novels of Jules Verne for inspiration we wished to open our workshops to a view of a wider universe,” says Nicolas Bos, vice president and director of creation. “This enables us to explore creative sources that are different from those that come from the world of high jewelry, while still retaining total freedom of expression.”