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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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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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.”

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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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