From Japanese anime to Elton John, here are all the latest happenings in the world of watches in the wake of the year’s Watches and Wonders showcase.
A longer Longines
A mechanical watch’s petrol gauge is the ‘power reserve’, a linear or radial indication of how urgently you need to wind up its barrel’s ‘mainspring’ via the crown on the right (a particularly satisfying morning ritual for those who continue to eschew the smartwatch). To mark the 70th anniversary of its evergreen Conquest (the first Longines watch line to have its name protected, in 1954, by the Federal Intellectual Property Office in Berne) Switzerland’s enduring grande maison has unveiled the Heritage Central Power Reserve.
It’s inspired by an iconic model from the late 1950s, when the brand had the edge even on the likes of Rolex and Omega. But not only do the sepia-tinted stylings belie the silicon-spiked 21st-century innovation ticking within, but those two concentric power-reserve rings at the centre remind you of Longines’ historic cleverness. Unique in the world of watchmaking, a blocky baton points to a disc, graduated from ‘64’ to ‘0’, uncoiling with the barrel: the watch’s remaining running time in hours.
• £3,500, longines.com
Elton John’s watch collection
Christie’s recently hosted a series of eight auctions offering iconic property from pop legend Elton John’s personal collection. The auctions included works of art, objects and memorabilia, many of them crafted specifically for his home on Peachtree Road in Atlanta. From 1992 Elton has consolidated adjoining units to form a veritable warehouse of garish stage costumes, watch cabinets, and frame upon frame of prints, speaking of the north west London wunderkind’s deep passion for photography.
It included work from pioneering artists such as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, Herb Ritts and Richard Avedon. On the watch front, our pick was the Rolex Daytona from 2004, in leopard-print dial and orange sapphires, something industry wags dubbed the ‘Bet Lynch’ of high-end chronographs.
Studio Ghibli x Seiko
Hayao is saying bye-o as director and animator extraordinaire of Studio Ghibli. Hayao Miyazaki’s swansong, The Boy and the Heron, continues to sweep the animated awards categories: arguably his finest hand-drawn feature since My Neighbour Totoro in 1988. Forty years on, trust Tokyo’s own Seiko to pay tribute to the film he’d made before he’d even founded Studio Ghibli: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), rendered in perfect, blue-enamelled watch form.
A horological ‘if you know, you know’, only a single dial adornment of the ‘Ohms’ (a giant, shell-covered, trilobite-like animal) hints at its heritage. The pure blue enamel was made possible through the skills of master craftsman Mitsuru Yokosawa and his team – all made in-house, like every other aspect of Seiko’s formidable, sprawling artisanal dynasty.
• Limited edition of 1,500; £1,540; 68 New Bond Street London W1S 1RR; seikoboutique.co.uk
Bamford x Bremont
British boys Bremont and Bamford Watch Department are presenting a second fusion of no-nonsense military-spec timekeeping with fanboy customisation: the ‘Aurora’.
The Arctic Circle’s shimmering ‘Borealis’ or ‘Northern Lights’, rendered in hyper-luminescent green dial details, is a 500-piece twist on Bremont’s signature Supermarine S502 diving watch. The carbon-coated case is entirely engineered on the premises near Henley, by 11-axis CNC milling machines, the chronometer-grade Swiss mechanics ticking steadily down to 500 metres beneath the waves.
Despite its youth, Bremont has found as many fans as Breitling in military pilots worldwide, but it takes Mayfair’s cult customiser Bamford Watch Department to bring even more cool to proceedings – not least in the decision to pair a half-Arabic, half-Roman, so-called ‘California’ dial with a 24-hour ‘GMT’ time-zone.
• bamfordwatchdepartment.com