Glorious Times

Mark life’s celebrations with Baume & Mercier’s Classima inspired from a 1940’s museum piece in its archives. Sleek in stainless steel, it features Roman numerals, a date window at 3 o’clock, and is equipped with a Swiss quartz movement. Designed for both women and men, it comes in three sizes: 40mm, 36.5mm and 31mm with a choice of steel bracelet or leather strap in intense blue or black.

On encountering an extraordinary set of emeralds, Cartier’s designers revived a papyrus motif typical of ancient Egypt, from the house’s archives. The result is the gorgeous Papyrus Exceptional Timepiece. Fashioned in white gold, it is set with 32 cushion-shaped Zambian emeralds, onyx, triangular diamonds, round brilliants and houses a manual winding calibre 846.

IWC Schaffhausen tempts women with its new Da Vinci Automatic 36 available in gold or stainless steel, with or without diamonds, and with a coloured alligator leather strap by Santoni. The most exclusive model is the Reference IW458310 fashioned in rose gold and linked bracelet and flaunting 54 pure white diamonds on its bezel. All watches are powered by the 35111 calibre and are tested for water resistance to 3 bar and boast a power reserve of 42 hours.

Jaeger-LeCoultre unfurls several new models in its Rendez-vous collection of luxurious ladies watches. And among them is a new moon-phase watch and versions of the existing Night & Day model in a 38.2mm case with elliptical, grained-texture dials with guilloche centres, floral shaped hands and a day and night indicator in a semicircular window near the 6 o’clock position. It is matched either by a stainless steel bracelet or a light blue ostrich leather strap.

Richard Mille unveiled a pair of ladies watches with gem-set North Thin Ply Technology (NTPT) carbon cases – the Automatic RM 07-01 Ladies and Automatic RM 037 Ladies. The material used in the sails of racing yachts has extreme hardness making it difficult to set diamonds. So hand-polished prongs in rose or white gold were produced separately and then inserted around the .25mm bearings. The NTPT Full Set version boasts no less than 250 diamonds.

First Lady Jackie Onassis had a favourite Piaget watch featuring a green jade dial and matched by a fabric-like gold bracelet. It appears in the new ‘Jackie’ movie played by Natalie Portman. To mark its premiere in Dubai, the iconic brand presented two Middle East exclusive pieces, one in pink gold with a malachite dial and the other in white gold with a Lapis Lazuli dial.    

A.Lange & Sohne presented seven new products at SIHH 2017. We select its vintage-looking 44.2mm Zeitwerk Decimal Strike. Crafted in honey gold, a material used exclusively by the Maison, it acoustically signals the time in ten-minute intervals with a chiming movement to make time audible in a new way. It has a large gold bridge with an hour window on one side and a minute window on the other and is matched by a brown leather strap.

Greubel Forsey’s 43.5mm Grand Sonnerie comprises 935 parts, its movement took ten years to make and it has a titanium case to make it lighter and make the chimes sound clear. It has a separate power supply for the time-keeping section (72 hours power reserve) and the chimes (20 hours power reserve). To enhance precision it’s also fitted with a hand-wound movement with a 24-second, 25 degree inclined tourbillion!

Panerai’s two new special editions of the 47mm Radiomir 3 Days Acciaio reiterate its role as a supplier of military instruments to the 1930s Royal Italian Navy and to the dial and bezel shape of its historic watches presented to them, who were then evaluating new instruments for underwater missions. One features a black and the other a brown dial and they have a 12-sided bezel screwed onto the Radiomir cushion caseband. Each is powered by a handwound Panerai P3000 mechanical movement.

Ulysse Nardin presented one of the most hailed timepieces at the SIHH 2017 – the InnoVision 2 where the brand exhibited for the very first time. It features ten futuristic innovations among them a new constant force escapement crafted in silicon, a sapphire-coated silicium bridge, 24k hard gold wheels to reduce friction, Super-Luminova-filled channels integrated into the glass balance wheel bridge and the use of glass in a watch movement.

Vacheron Constantin’s three Hallmark of Geneva certified Metiers d’Art Copernicus Celestial Spheres 2460 RT models feature dials inspired by 17^th century Baroque art. They feature two parts: an oval centre with a sun motif and an outer disc with decorative craft, a cut-out hours hand and a solid minute hand. It depicts the elliptical path of the earth around the sun with the planet spinning on its own axis, with a device requiring one correction every 8,000 years! All the functions are adjusted via the crown. 

Its new tie-up with racing tire-maker Pirelli sees Roger Dubuis present the 47mm black DLC-coated titanium Excalibur Spider Pirelli with double flying tourbillion in a limited edition of just eight pieces. Featuring blue rubber accents accenting the official Pirelli colour, it is powered by a highly skeletonised movement caliber RD105SQ made up of 365 parts. Its power reserve is inspired by racing car fuel gauges.    

Montblanc revamps the TimeWalker collection with the new TimeWalker Chronograph UTC. It comes in a 43mm DLC-coated case with black ceramic elements and boasts a black ceramic uni-directional rotating bezel with 24-hour indication. The black dial recalls an old car dashboard with two vertically aligned subsidiary dials for the chronograph with one being a 30-mionute register and the other a 12-hour register. It is water resistant to 100 meters.

Inspired by the crystal clear night skies of Val-deTravers, Parmigiani Fleurier’s Tonda 1950 Galaxy features an attractive aventurine dial, a material with a fascinating history. In 18^th century, a glassblower Murano, dropped a sliver of copper onto melted glass and named it ‘per aventura’ (chance in Italian). It’s ringed by a diamond-set bezel while its crown features a milky white opal and it’s driven by the PF702 proprietary movement, decorated with Cotes de Geneve.

The new 37mm Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Frosted Gold celebrates 40 years of the Royal Oak for ladies and is created by a surface treatment process rooted in an ancient gold hammering technique called the Florentine technique.  It has an iconic Genta-look and a hand-guilloche dial and an in-house movement Calibre 3120.

Girard Perregaux’s new classic 40mm, WW.TC (World Wide Time Control) watch from its 1966 collection is ideal for the individual who works on a global scale. Featuring clean lines it has two crowns on opposite sides, one at 3 o’clock and the other at 9 o’clock. The dial has a 24-hour rotating disc with a night and day indicator and allows the wearer to read the time on all 24 world cities easily. It’s driven by a manufacture automatic movement with a power reserve of 46 hours.