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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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IWC 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.

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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.

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Piaget Emperador Coussin Tourbillon Automatic

Even before the economic crisis, old-guard watch houses were referencing their archives for inspiration, perhaps looking for an antidote to the design excess of the mid-aughts. Amid a sea of behemoth Darth Vader watches, retro styles were aesthetic palate cleansers that oozed elegance and good taste. The financial crisis only reinforced this trend as brands espoused the lasting value of classic design. Another boost came from the burgeoning Chinese market, where classic, round watches from status marques continue to be in high demand. The retro resurgence has swept in a new generation of ultra-thin watches modeled on the svelte timepieces of the 1950s and 1960s. This year, brand after brand offers its own take on thin—most still referencing the past. But Richard Mille and Piaget have been proving that thin doesn’t have to mean traditional anymore.

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As I recently held MB&F’s latest twin-engine HM4, aptly dubbed Thunderbolt, I recalled the first time I saw the prototype for MB&F’s HM1 (Horological Machine Number 1) in a Geneva café before the nascent brand’s debut piece launched in 2006. Max Büsser took a huge risk by investing in a boutique brand that embodied his radical vision of watchmaking, and it has paid off with a devoted fan base enamored with the concept of wearing futuristic machines rather than watches. Though the Thunderbolt’s functions are straightforward—hours and minutes with power reserve—the design is anything but simple. Inspired by the model airplanes he assembled as a kid, Büsser’s titanium and sapphire crystal instrument was three years in the making, given the complexity of its specially designed 300-plus components.

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