April 09, 2019

COMIC TIMING

by AHMED SEDDIQI & SONS

Most watches are round with three hands and a leather strap. But sometimes watch design can be a lot more entertaining

Close your eyes and picture a watch. Chances are, your mind has gone to a classic round-cased model with two or three hands and a brown or black leather strap. Something simple like a Patek Philippe Calatrava, or a TAG Heuer Carrera. These are forms that have been with us for generations. They don’t change and there’s no reason to believe they won’t be with us forever.

There are two reasons for this. First is that the design works – and we all like design that does what it’s supposed to do well. At heart, a watch is a tool for telling the time. Representing the time over two 12-hour half-days around a 360-degree dial makes sense. Other applications have come and stayed – digital displays, for example – but none has done for the original. And second, it’s because we like it. The round form is organic, natural, easy on the eye. It pleases most people, most of the time.
But not all of the people all of the time.

One of the benefits of the watch industry boom of the last 30 years is that it has created space for brands that take a more playful approach to watch design. In some cases, that means reimagining the way we tell the time (see Urwerk or MB&F), but in others it simply means spicing things up with colourful decoration. Watches like these make the watchmaking landscape so much more entertaining.
Here’s Ahmed Seddiqi & Son’s edit of the watches that do away with the straight jacket, just for the fun of it.

De Grisogono Uno Crazymals N08

Many of those brands adding colour to the landscape have been born since these prosperous watchmaking times began. De Grisogono was founded by black diamond specialist Fawaz Gruosi in 1993 and its flamboyant watches mirror the man’s own zest for life. The Uno Crazymals collection concocts images of animals on watch dials using a combination of precious stones, in this case a koala set with sapphires and diamonds. The bubbly strap is made of orange galuchat, or fish leather, and the movement is an automatic mechanical.

TAG Heuer Carrera Heuer 01 Alec Monopoly

New York street and graffiti artist Alec Monopoly made his name satirizing Wall Street in the aftermath of the global financial crash and was more used to painting vast canvases and wall murals before he was invited by Swiss giant TAG Heuer to lend his inimitable style to a watch dial. The product of the collaboration is this Carrera Chronograph sports watch, which features his signature floating greenbacks and the masked figure, Monopoly’s caricature of himself. Underneath that is TAG Heuer’s high-performance in-house automatic chronograph calibre.

Christophe Claret Poker

The independent watchmaker Christophe Claret’s antidote to straight-laced watch design is his gaming watches trilogy: one offering Blackjack, another Baccara and a third Poker, pictured here. Rather than simply being an aesthetic device, the games are actually the watch’s complication. In this case, three people can play a game of Texas Hold‘em using the deck of miniature cards loaded into the watch. Three windows around the dial partially obscure three playing hands, only visible if you’re looking at the watch from 1.30, 6 or 11.30. The watch is an automaton, or a mechanical robot, and can create 98,304 different combinations of cards in a three-player game. Along the way, it also tells the time.

RJ Collaboration Moon Invader

The family name behind this RJ (formerly Romain Jerome) trio suggests these are no ordinary watches, but it’s the detail in each that truly gives the game away. All are inspired by classic arcade games – from left, Pacman, Space Invaders and Tetris. In contrast to Christophe Claret’s poker watch, the games offer visual inspiration only; each features lacquered detailing to give the dials of these 46mm black-PVD-coated titanium watches their nostalgic quirk.

Hublot Big Bang One Click Calavera Catrina King Gold

The bold form of Hublot’s Big Bang is no longer the cultural anomaly it was on launch in 2005, but what its case shape might lack in contemporary drama, it often more than makes up for with unexpected collaborations, novel material pairings and funky dial decorations. This 50-piece limited edition is inspired by Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, and has a 39mm King Gold case and a bezel set with sapphires that create a colour code that influences both the skull motif on the dial and the print on the rubber and calf strap. One Click is the name of Hublot’s quick-change strap system.

Corum Bubble 47 Game

The Corum Bubble has been with us since the turn of the Millennium and still feels as fresh today as it did on launch. Coming into contact with one for the first time, you’re always struck by its size and by the extreme curvature of the ‘bubble’ sapphire crystal. Its bulbous dimensions and the visual dynamics of that glass dome create an open palette that Corum’s mischievous creatives have always been keen to exploit. Here, they’ve decorated the dial with playing cards that spell out the brand name.

Claude Meylan Tortue 6047-WPT Calavera

In this version of its Tortue, Claude Meylan, the master of skeletonised watches, makes the inevitable connection between the bare-boned aesthetic of its designs with a Mexican ‘calavera’, or skull. Both the watch’s 40mm stainless steel tortue (this time a French word, meaning ‘tortoise’) case and open-worked bridges are finished using a rare water-printing technique. The company keeps the know-how behind this secret, but confidently claims it also applies a finish that ‘provides the parts with unfailing durability’.