No products in the cart.
Best Super NEWS Watches
The watches you see today in Bring A Loupe don't joke around. You can expect to find the aptly named Chronometre Royal from Vacheron Constantin with all its original chronometer certificates. No less precise is the Zenith 40T, a testimony of this manufacture's ability to reach extreme precision. We also bring you a full set Daytona, and a far-from-perfect Universal Geneve Uni-Compax. This is your Bring A Loupe for April 1, 2016. A Zenith Chronometre With Caliber 40T The dial of this Zenith reveals so much about this chronometer, even quoting the name of its caliber 40T in a very interesting script ab...
As we at HODINKEE like to do, I am thrilled to give you an early look at some of the highlights from the May 2016 auction season C here with a focus on our friends at Christie's. We already know that cross-town rival Phillips has a special, stainless-steel chronographs sale planned for the weekend of May 14th in Geneva, but that doesn't mean Christie's isn't going down without a fight. In fact, based on what you'll see here, it's fair to say we are in for an absolutely incredible weekend of watch sales. Let's get down to it. The Earliest Patek Philippe 530 Oversized Chronograph In Steel, With A Sector Dial This 530 Steel is the ...
Hands-On: The Jaquet Droz Montre De Poche Email Ivoire, A Pocket Watch With A Past
La Montre de Poche Email Ivoire means, more or less, "Pocket Watch with Ivory Enamel," and of all the timepieces Jaquet Droz makes, this is perhaps the most traditional in both appearance and construction. It's a pocket watch whose design is based on the Grande Seconde pocket watch created by Pierre Jacquet-Droz in around 1790, and the movement inside is as much a part of the fascination of this watch as the design. Pocket watches are indisputably archaic, but they have a charm that no wristwatch can claim to have. As you probably know, the wristwatch is a relative newcomer in horology. T...
The watch maketh the man, not his clothes. At least, thats our line of thinking at HODINKEE. But sartorial choices have come under scrutiny this week. After entertaining the idea that watches could in fact be worn with a tuxedo (shocker, right?), we take a look at a new collection of tailor-inspired and tailor-made watches from Vacheron Constantin. Capitalizing on the resurgence of style, as defined by men who shop exclusively on Saville Row and have Pitti Uomo saved in their calendar for the next ten years, Vacheron Constantin have teamed up with the worlds oldest fabric manufacturer, Vitale Barberis Canonico, for a sartor...
Found: A Breguet Pocket Watch, A Renoir, And The Mystery Of One Of The Greatest Breguet Collectors
Seeking shelter and distraction on a windy Sunday, some friends and I purchased tickets to the National Gallery in London to see the highly recommended "Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art" exhibition. When in doubt, spending a few hours in the company of Matisse, Kandinsky, and Gaugin is never time wasted. Still shivering from the cold, we made our way down the stone steps of the Museum. Somewhat ironically, it was not Delacroix whom I wanted to see, but Renoir. His version of Delacroixs The Jewish Wedding In Morocco had recently popped up during my research on the worlds first perpetual calendar wristwatch, a Breguet. Bo...
New In The HODINKEE Shop: Our Exquisitely Crafted Date Window Masks
Date windows on time-only wristwatches: some of you love them, some of you hate them, but now, there's something you can do about them. ?Don't be a helpless, passive onlooker anymore C with our hand-crafted, artisanal Date Window Masks and a few minutes of spare time, you can be where you want and deserve to be when it comes to date windows: in the driver's seat. These are the real deal: each date window is handcrafted for HODINKEE exclusively, and for you, by craftsmen working in traditional date window mask workshops nestled in the hillsides of Tuscany, where our exquisitely and laboriously made straps and other fine leathe...
If there were a search for the last honest watch on Earth C a watch that embodies down to the deepest fiber of its being what it really means to be a genuine tool watch, and not just a (generally overpriced) illustration of what a tool watch used to be, chances are very good that it would be a Casio G-Shock. Unloved by many who think of themselves as real watch lovers, the G-Shock is very much loved by those who need a watch that will put up with the very roughest use the very roughest and most dangerous jobs can dish out. G-Shocks are worn by more than a few hipsters and would-be hipsters these days, but they're also worn by the thousands by police officers, firefighters, special forces ope...
Landmark Lower Manhattan Clock Tower Saved From Condo Conversion
Last October HODINKEE featured a guest editorial from Mr. Troy Torrison, board member of the Tribeca Trust, describing the struggle (and lawsuit) to save a landmark clock in New York City. The clock in question is perched atop the New York Life Insurance Company's former headquarters at 346 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, which is being converted to "luxury condominium residences." The clock tower contains valuable square footage occupied by a large mechanical movement that the developers wanted to remove. They argued that the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission should not be able to grant landmark status to a mechanical clock movement, but Justice Kotler of the New York State Supreme Court d...
Announcing The Sixth Annual Madison Avenue Watch Week
We've made it through another year at Baselworld and at the SIHH, and now it's time for one of New York's biggest watch events: get ready for the sixth edition of Madison Avenue Watch Week, with 13 of the world's most important haute horlogiere houses to participate. As always, Madison Avenue Watch Week is presented by The Wall Street Journal, the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District, and the Horological Society of New York C and, of course, brands and retailers who've made Madison Avenue one of the most important gathering places for fine watchmaking in the world. ...
Editorial: Personal Thoughts On The Phillips Start-Stop-Reset Steel Chronographs Sale
The art of the thematic watch sale is a delicate one, indeed. In the modern era, the benchmark by which all other thematic sales are measured is that of the Christie's-under-Aurel-Bacs Lesson One: Daytona sale, where 50 watches sold, 50 records were set, and the final sale brought in a mind-blowing four times the high estimate. I was in the audience, and the room was really, truly electric C and not just electric for a watch auction, which as you may know, means very little, but like, actually exciting. This sale was crazy, and the results were mind-blowing C the reverberations of which we still feel today in the current Daytona market, two and a half years later. ...
A Week On The Wrist: The Glycine Airman No. 1
During most of my journey from Bangkok to Calcutta, I was seated at the place of the First Officer, next to the commander in a DC-4 from Thai Airways. The captain explained to me in detail what kind of watch pilots from all nations would actually need. According to him this watch is not on the market.Those words were penned in 1953 by Samuel Glur, a traveling executive with the Altus-Glycine watch company of Biel, Switzerland. His letter went on to list the requirements for the perfect pilots watch for the new era of intercontinental commercial air travel. The watch would be able to track two time zones on a 24-hour scale, giving a pilot access to both his local time as well as a GMT refe...
Introducing: The Seiko FUGAKU Limited Edition Tourbillon
In what was, in general, a somewhat subdued Baselworld, and one in which we saw more incremental improvements than spectacular debuts, there were still a few new product introductions that really stood out. One of the most memorable, and certainly one of the most unexpected, was from Seiko: the FUGAKU Tourbillon, a limited edition of eight pieces. This is nothing less than Seiko's very first in-house tourbillon (for that matter, Seiko's first tourbillon of any kind) and both the technical inventiveness of the FUGAKU, as well as its colorful interpretation of a famous work of art C The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, by the Edo-period artist known as Hokusai C caught many of us off guard, and challe...
Major news out of Biel, Switzerland, this morning: The Swatch Group has announced the appointment of a new president at Omega, following Stephen Urquharts decision to retire.Mr. Urquhart, 69, had been Omegas president and CEO since 1999, and was an important member of the Swatch Group Extended Group Management Board. He retires in June, but will continue to work closely with Omega as a consultant on special projects. His decision comes during a crucial time for Omega, just weeks after Baselworld and months before the Summer Olympics in Rio, its single largest communications operation of the year.Replacing him at the top on June 1 will be Raynald Aeschlimann. Mr. Aeschlimann has been a memb...
Inside The Manufacture: A Visit To NOMOS Glashtte, From Design To Production (VIDEO)
Late last year, our trusty producer, Will, and I had the joy of traveling to Germany to visit the folks from NOMOS Glashtte C a brand that is no stranger to us at HODINKEE, or you, as readers of HODINKEE. NOMOS is a small independent watch brand of roughly 260 employees based in Berlin and Glashtte with a very simple goal ?C to make (mostly) in-house, affordable, and well-designed wristwatches. No quartz, just good old-fashioned well-made movements that range in cost, for the majority of the collection, between $1,500 and $4,000 C a noble goal if there ever was one. We know all this, but I wanted to know more, so that in detail, I could answer the questions "who or what is NOMOS?" and "how...
Montblanc has just decided to surprise us with an anniversary piece that is, much, much more baroque than what were accustomed to seeing lately from the Villeret-based manufacture.This years collection, presented during SIHH, reaffirmed Montblancs commitment to high-end watches with classic features such as the Heritage Chronomtrie Annual Calendar Chronograph and the 4810 Day-Date. That is, until its latest addition to the 2016 lineup.The Villeret Tourbillon Bi-Cylindrique 110 Years Anniversary is a watch youd expect from the likes of Richard Mille, and other independent names that are not bound by traditionalism or corporate behavior. But the slithering serpent sneaking inside its dial...
This week will be dedicated to watches with complications. We start big with the Patek Philippe reference 1526, the first perpetual calendar produced in series, mostly during the 1940s. We will also look at a Rolex GMT with a killer bezel, as well as a Rolex Tru-Beat with a lovely ticking second hand. Finally, we've got a couple of examples of everyone's favorit complication, the chronograph, from a Heuer Carrera to a blue Hamilton Chrono-Matic. This is your Bring A Loupe for April 8, 2016. A Patek Philippe Reference 1526 C A Legendary Perpetual Calendar With Moon Phase The 1526 is one of Patek Philip...
The Autavia Cup: Round One Results, Early Conclusions, And A Quick Look At Round Two
The first round of the Autavia Cup is over, and already we can draw some conclusions about the publics preferences. The online competition C which relies on the publics vote C will determine the look of a future Autavia model, to be presented in 2017 by TAG Heuer. So far, the contests have been pretty one-sided, the closest match-up coming from two versions of the Reference 2446. But already we can draw some conclusions from the results of the first round: 1) People Like A Panda No surprise there. Everybody loves a panda. So-called because their face looks like that of Giant Panda, these black a...
The tourbillon hasn't exactly become ubiquitous, but there's an argument to be made that it may be, just a bit, a victim of its own success. To put it more exactly, the tourbillon may be a victim of the success of modern precision manufacturing methods, which have made it possible to produce tourbillon wristwatches that can be priced almost unbelievably inexpensively, relative to the prices the complication used to command. However, if there is one almost universally valid truism in mechanical horology nowadays, it's that it's not so much what you do as how you do it, and how Jaeger-LeCoultre did tourbillons C and continues to do them C is a microcosm of the evolution of the tourbillon, and ...
Englands Danny Willett was already reaching for his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph when Jordan Spieth missed a short putt for birdie on the 16th hole, all but sealing the race for the 80th Masters. And the carbon watch was on Willetts wrist by the time he was presented with the Green Jacket, the first of his career.Spieth looked to be on course for his second consecutive Masters title, leading the pack from day one and starting strongly on the final round. But the young American crumbled on the back nine, scoring a quadruple-bogey on the 12th and leaving room for an unlikely comeback. Willett, who started the day three shots behind Spieth, fired a 67 to capture the 80th Mas...
Inside The Manufacture: With Jaeger-LeCoultre In Switzerland, Pt. 2: Secrets Of The Atmos Clock
The Atmos clock is one of the essential timepieces made by Jaeger-LeCoultre, and, at least among horological enthusiasts, it's also probably the single best-known clock in the world. The first prototype was built in 1928, by an engineer named Jean-Lon Reutter (a resident of Ne?chatel). The Atmos was not the first clock to be wound by changes in the atmosphere around it; clocks powered by temperature or air pressure changes go back to the 17th century, when the very first known was invented by Cornelius Drebbel. (Drebbel, an impressive polymath, is remembered today for inventing the first navigable submarine, but he also invented an early working air conditioner, different types of thermomet...