THE MB&F LEGACY MACHINE FLYING T: A WATCH FOR REBELLIOUS WOMEN

This is why independent watchmaker MB&F has always commanded such fascination for so many watch buyers and collectors. Its founder, Maximilian Büsser, is not one for the status quo.

He has said that when launching his company in 2005, he felt a range of emotions, ‘from passion and relief to strong anger’. Prior to that, he was, he said, mad at himself for selling out, for chasing profitsand growth instead of pushing the boundaries of creative watchmaking. MB&F was, he says, the antidote – and his rebellion.

This, believe it or not, was the thought MB&F presented this week on launching yet another spellbinding watch, the MB&F Legacy Machine FlyingT. Anger and rebellion – in Swiss watchmaking?

It wasn’t the only thought, though. It was swiftly followed by another uncommonly honest assessment. Max, as he’s known, admitted that for 14 years he has been designing watches for himself. And why not, you might say – it’s his company. But what that meant, he added, was that he’d never designed a watch for any of the women in his life, and furthermore, he had no idea how to. ‘What do women want?’ was the question he said he’d asked himself.

The answer, he concluded, was to capture the ‘supreme elegance’ and ‘tremendous vitality’ of the women he knew, particularly his mother, and then to encode those in an MB&F watch. In other words, into a piece of mechanical sculpture that would sit alongside the gloriously imaginative pieces of kinetic art that he’s created for men – although many women wear his watches – over the previous decade and a half.

Using that, he conceptualised the MB&F Legacy Machine FlyingT, the company’s first women’s watch. It is, in keeping with his brief, elegant, brimming with energy, and a startling piece of mechanical sculpture.

The first thing you notice when seeing the watch in three dimensions, is the towering sapphire crystal dome. Underneath it is the regulating organ that gives the watch its name – a 60-second flying tourbillon. Max says he wanted it to resemble a pillar, to mirror the role women have played in his life.

As MB&F has done previously with its Legacy Machines, the workings of that tourbillon have been left exposed so you can see the elegant complexity of the mechanics and the detail in the finishing. The dial, with its ‘serpentine’ hands, appears to lean nonchalantly against it, as if en repose, although the practical reason behind its position is so that only the wearer can read it.

From above, the 38.5mm white-gold case has an almost conventional shape, although the way the lugs and case appear to envelop one another has a fluid, particularly feminine beauty to it. Twin crowns, one for winding and one for setting the watch, lend it symmetry, one of the great qualifiers of true beauty. And underneath is the automatic movement’s rotor, a three-dimensional red gold sun with sculpted rays that Max says symbolises life-giving – a strong female quality. When fully wound, the movement delivers 100 hours of power.

The final indulgence is in the diamond setting. MB&F has created three versions of the watch – one with a black lacquer dial and a case set with brilliant-cut diamonds; a second with both case and dial fully set with brilliant-cut diamonds; and a third, an even more astonishing work of art, fully set with baguette diamonds, totalling 8.2 carats.

It may have been 14 years coming, but MB&F’s first women’s watch, the Legacy Machine FlyingT, has been worth the wait.