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Best Super NEWS Watches
After a full week dedicated to the SIHH novelties, vintage watches are finally back today. We start with a great Heuer Autavia "Rindt" coming from a very reputable source, and then look at an intriguing Wingo, which shares many features with the Yema Yachtingraf. You will also see an uncommon Rolex Date reference 1530 and a nice Zenith El Primero with fum dial. This is your Bring A Loupe for January 20, 2017. Wingo Yachtingraph, A Private Label From The French Brand Yema Not much information can be found on Wingo, except for a handful of different watches from the 1960s. For this chronograph, it see...
The SIHH is just now coming to a close, and by now we all know the big introductions for most of the exhibiting brands (or maison, if you will) and of course at IWC this is the year of the Da Vinci. The Perpetual Calendar Chronograph in red gold got some early exposure in December, but it has a sibling in steel as well, and we've had a chance to take a look at it, go hands-on, and see how it feels on the wrist. By the numbers and in terms of functionality, it is of course exactly the same as the red gold model C 14.5mm thick and 43mm in diameter, with articulated lugs, and the self-winding IWC caliber 89630, with a 68-hour power reserve, three bar water res...
While a bracelet may not get your average watch guy's juices flowing, to those who have worn everything from the best of the best (looking at you AP and Rolex, and you Gay Frres circa 1950s) to the worst (those hair-grabbing knock-off beads-of-rice bracelets you buy on Ebay for your vintage chrono when you cant find the original), it can make all the difference between a piece you like, love, or cant wait to get rid of. This year Jaeger-LeCoultre is showing a bracelet option for the Geophysic True Second, a favorite watch of ours, and here is what makes this one so interesting. First, aesthetically, this watch sits somewhere between a sports/tool watch a...
Just Because: A Piece Unique 44mm Stainless Steel Vingt-8 From Kari Voutilainen
Sometimes a watch just comes out of nowhere and even when it's sitting right in front of you on a table, you still can't believe it's actually real. A few days ago at the SIHH, I was having a chat with Kari Voutilainen about his Comblmine dial factory when he said "Oh, I have something else to show you." What appeared on the felt-lined tray was a piece unique 44mm stainless steel watch that looked every bit a Kari Voutilainen. And it was awesome. Most of Kari Voutilainen's watches are custom orders. His small team of fewer than two dozen people makes just about 30 watches per year. Recently, a physically larger customer with bigger wrists wanted to order s...
One of the most fun things about trade shows is running into the people behind?the brands and seeing what they're wearing on their wrists. When I ran into Robert-Jan Broer, I saw the prototype of the Omega "Speedy Tuesday" limited edition. And about three minutes before I ran into RJ, I ran into Mr. Eric Giroud. For those who don't know his name C and to be clear, unless you're in the industry, most would not C he is one of the most prolific watch designers today. He's worked for everyone from MB&F to Van Cleef to Tissot to Vacheron Constantin and even Universal Genve many moons ago! You might not know his name, but you surely know his work, and we featured an interview with Giroud a fe...
Hands-On: The MCT Sequential One 110 Evo Vantablack, The Darkest Watch Ever Made
Before you say anything, yes, I know there are grey and white sections of this watch. It's not the darkest watch in that there are the most black components on the watch. No, it's the darkest in a much cooler way: the black parts are actually darker than the black parts on any other watch. The inside of the case of this limited edition MCT Sequential One are coated in Vantablack, the darkest substance ever made by human beings. You really can't believe it until you see it. First off, what the heck is Vantablack? It is the darkest substance produced by human beings and was first created by Surrey Nanosystems in the United Kingdom in 2014. On a very basic level, it...
SIHH was a mighty birthday celebration for the now-60-year-old Piaget Altiplano. Looking at the new releases from Piaget this year, almost all are are from the Altiplano collection, save a few limited edition PoloS models (more on those later). We have already shown you?the two Altiplanos explicitly dedicated to the 60th anniversary, but these new references with automatic movements and date function further demonstrate that Piaget is doubling down on its history. Let's see why this is both great news and a bold move. Let's start at the beginning, with the references 13103 and 13104. Those 34mm diameter, slim watches were not called "Altiplano," nor they di...
Business News: Auctionata Files For Insolvency, Reportedly Has Not Paid Salaries Since December
First reported by German business newspaper WirtschaftsWoche, there is news today that Berlin-based auction house Auctionata has filed for insolvency. Auctionata is a multi-focus auction house that offered multiple sales per quarter all over the world without live audiences present. Bidding takes place predominantly online and the format relied heavily on a proprietary live filming system that also encouraged bidders to stop the auction mid-sale to ask their experts questions about the lots as bidding was taking place.? The idea itself was an interesting one, but there were constant claims poor service, fake or mislabeled products, and lack of payment in th...
It's been a while, but it's Three On Three time again. We've compared funky independent watches under $15,000, in-house, manually-wound dress watches under $20,000, and even some powerhouse chronographs from the biggest name manufactures around. But now it's time to tackle one of the most popular categories of watches of the modern era: stainless steel luxury sport watches. Here we've got the watch that started it all, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, the modern interpretation from an old-school manufacture, the Vacheron Constantin Overseas, and a totally new budget-friendly addition to the category, the Piaget Polo S. Enjoy the video above, and read on for all the details. ...
In 2016, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) took its horological education classes on the road, visiting Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The classes sold out quickly and were full of enthusiastic students, all eager to learn how a mechanical watch works first-hand. The response to the classes was incredible. For 2017, HSNY will continue its educational tour by visiting cities across the country, with the first two stops being Chicago and Philadelphia. Horological Education classes will be offered in Chicago over the weekend of February 11, at Oak & Oscar's beautiful new offices. The next weekend, that of February 18, HSNY will head east t...
From 2005 to 2008 or so, so many incredible watches were sold publicly without much fanfare at all. This was the pre-HODINKEE days, pre-Instagram, pre-anything, really. The few watch magazines and sites that were around barely made mention of any vintage watches and because of that, many of us have forgotten these incredible piece. But just because the #internet wasn't paying attention to the auction world, it doesn't mean there wasn't a small but dedicated set of collectors keeping a close eye C and because of it, some of the results from that period of time are still record holders to this day. One such example is lot number 83 in the Christie's November 2007 sale C a platinum Patek Philip...
Hands-On: The Greubel Forsey Tourbillon 24 Secondes Vision In Platinum With A Chocolate Brown Dial
Last week, the HODINKEE editorial team spent time with watches that display all kinds of information, from the essential (the time) to the unnecessary-but-neat (the position of the Earth during its annual revolution around the sun, for example) to, in some cases, the downright absurd (a tachymeter scaled to the speed a Bugatti Chiron). The truth is, collectors are spoiled for choice these days. Personally, with every passing SIHH, I find myself increasingly disinterested with everything that isnt a time-only or an ultra-complicated wristwatch. To me, this is where the magic happens. On one end of the spectrum, what you get is the purest expression of a co...
Introducing: The Parmigiani Fleurier Toric Chronomtre
The Toric Collection, you might say, stands out amongst the other Parmigiani collections by not standing out; the cases are round and the lug shapes in general are more conventional than those in any of Parmigiani's other families of watches. This is not to say that they're simple though. As a matter of fact, of the 10 Toric models in the current PF catalog, five are minute repeaters, while four are variations on this new model, which is the simplest Toric by a considerable margin. The Toric Chronomtre is a COSC-certified chronometer wristwatch with date. The Toric Chronomtre comes in two metals C white and red gold C and case dimensions are 40.8mm x 9.5m...
You'd be hard-pressed to think of two more influential men in the world of watches than Richemont's Franco Cologni and LVMH's Jean-Claude Biver. They are both bastions of the old guard C working their way up from the bottom in the 1970s to become true visionaries and decision-makers in this space today. Cologni began his career selling licensed Cartier-branded cigarette lighters and eventually became not only CEO of Cartier for some time, but also later chairman of Vacheron Constantin and Panerai, both of which he was instrumental in bringing into the Richemont group. A board member for some time, Cologni is responsible for a lot of what we see at Richemont. And Biver, well, you know his sto...
Recommended Reading: Teaching Failing Hearts To Beat Like Clockwork
In the 21st century, mechanical watchmaking has become almost exclusively a thing of luxury and curiosity. It has very few practical purposes that cannot be better served with electronic timekeepers of various kinds. But, scientists at the University Hospital of Bern have discovered a way to use the most basic of automatic watch winding technology C the swinging rotor C as a power source for pacemakers, reducing the need for battery changes and possible failures. When you wear an automatic watch, the movements of your wrist swing the weighted rotor, which, in turn, winds the power barrel. What these researchers realized is that the movement the heart create...
Hands-On: The Montblanc TimeWalker Chronograph Automatic
For Montblanc, this year is all about the newly revamped TimeWalker collection. For a long time it's been the best-selling family of watches for Montblanc in the United States, but at SIHH we saw the entire line get a redesign from top to bottom. The new TimeWalker is inspired by vintage auto racing, with the design codes, color schemes, and complications that go along with that theme. The consumer-friendly flagship is the TimeWalker Chronograph, and here's a hands-on look at Montblanc's most important release of 2017. The bright red TimeWalker logo matches the main chronograph seconds hand. There are a few new TimeWalkers, an...
Introducing: The De Bethune DB25L Milky Way, A Miniature Representation Of Our Galaxy For The Wrist
Celestial complications are not everybodys cup of tea, some finding them a little too old-school for their liking. Well, to them I say, check out De Bethune. The independent brand, founded in 2002, has a bit of a thing for the night sky. Instead of confining the blue and gold complication to a small section of the dial though, De Bethune uses the full width of the dial to bring us a little closer to the stars, such as with?the DB25T.?Now we get the DB25L Milky Way, De Bethune's latest model to offer a telescopic view of our galaxy. To create the unique dial effect, De Bethune uses a titanium disc that has been flame-blued, studded with little white gold s...
Editors' Picks: The Best Everyday Watches Of SIHH 2017
It's been less than a week since the 2017 Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) closed its doors, but the dust is finally starting to settle. After six days of non-stop watch gazing in Geneva, the HODINKEE team returned home with full notebooks, thousands of photos, and more than a few opinions on the year's first big batch of new releases. To kick off a short series of stories sharing our editors' favorite picks from the hundreds of new watches, we asked each team member to pick the one all-purpose watch they'd want to wear day in and day out. It's a tough question, but we got some pretty great answers. Cara Barrett C?Little Lange 1 Moon Phase ...
When I say "perpetual calendar," this probably isn't what comes to mind. You're likely imagining something like the ceramic Royal Oak Perpetual calendar or the more traditional Patrimony Perpetual. But this little desk-top device of the same name is a manual timekeeper that the user sets each morning and then references throughout the day. It's called a perpetual calendar because, in theory, it will work forever. The Perpetuum Calendar comes to us from 3D-printed design firm OTHR and Spanish designers Studio Yonoh and it's about as cool a balance springCfree perpetual calendar as you'll find anywhere. In case you're not familiar, OTHR launched last year and...
In-Depth: The Seiko Credor Eichi II
For a company based in a country about which one of the prevailing stereotypes is collective uniformity of identity, Seiko is extremely diverse in what it creates C sometimes, and especially for newcomers to watches as a hobby, bewilderingly so. The watches made by Seiko run the gamut from simple, inexpensive quartz watches and the ever-popular Seiko 5, all the way up to what you see here: the Seiko Credor Eichi II, a hand-made, platinum wristwatch with a hand-decorated porcelain dial and a Spring Drive movement finished to within an inch of its life, made in extremely small numbers. This might just be the most interesting time-only watch on planet Earth. ...