Jack’s Picks: High Design Timepieces

There is something archetypally satisfying about a round wristwatch. Time, it has been intuited for as long as humans have measured it, occurs in repeating cycles and we have been tracking those cycles to increasingly finer resolution since, probably, the Paleolithic (and maybe much longer than that. How do salmon know when it’s time to spawn, or cicadas that 17 years have gone by?). It’s natural therefore, for the cycle of hours and minutes to be represented by a circle. There are practical reasons as well; the gears on which every mechanical timekeeper depends are circular. But, the symbolic importance of representing repeating cycles of time in circles cannot be overstated in the history of watch and clock design.
This is not to say that there isn’t more than one way to skin a cat, however, and while most of the history of watch and clock making exhibits the irresistible attraction of circular dials, hands traveling in circles, and circular cases, there are innumerable and often very attractive alternatives to round-cased watches once you start getting off the beaten track.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165675" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-Patek-Philippe-Pocket-Watch.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Patek Philippe Pocket Watch" width="1200" height="820" />
The shape of watches during the pocket watch era was extremely monotonous and there were hardly ever anything other than round pocket watches. There was a good reason for this; pocket watches live in pockets and anything other than a smooth, rounded shape would be apt to snag as you took the watch out to look at the time. Generally gents wore pocket watches in vest or waistcoat pockets which made roundness and smoothness even more urgent, since vests traditionally were cut close to the body.
But once the wristwatch started to become popular, at the beginning of the 20th century, the circle was broken almost immediately. The first widely used wristwatches (worn in the trenches during World War I) were simply pocket watches with lugs soldered on, but as soon as the war ended, wristwatches that departed enthusiastically from the tyranny of round cases appeared like so many exotic mushrooms after a thunderstorm.
<h2>The Birth of the Wristwatch and the Shape of Things to Come</h2>
One of the biggest innovators in shaped watches was Cartier. The Santos-Dumont preceded the outbreak of war in 1914 (and, having been made specifically at the request of an aviation pioneer, has the distinction of being the first purpose-made pilot’s watch) but after the Armistice, Louis Cartier really went to town. We got the Tonneau (also before the war) and then over a little more than a decade later, a wild variety of Tank watches, including the original Normale, the Tank Louis Cartier, the Cintrée, the Basculante, the Tank à Guichet, and others — wrist-wearable celebrations of the Roaring ’20s and the influence of the Art Deco movement.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165680" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-Cartier-Tanks.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Cartier Tank Watch" width="1200" height="763" />
World War II pretty much brought any notions of wildly exuberant anything, much less wristwatch design, to a screeching halt, and the 1950s and much of the 1960s saw the overwhelming dominance of the round, no-nonsense workmanlike watch return (even the most complicated wristwatches remained quite sober expressions of design). There were exceptions, of course; the Cartier Crash, introduced by Cartier London in 1967, is a wild thing, but wristwatches generally stayed restrained.
Quartz technology, heresy though it might be to say so, gave us some of most imaginative watch designs of the late 20th century, including Citizen’s first light-powered watches and of course, the Casio G-Shock, a watch which brought announcing Schwarzenegger-like toughness loud and clear into mainstream watch design.
But there’s no question the two landmark wristwatch designs of the late 20th century were the incredibly expensive and completely unmistakable Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, and the Patek Philippe Nautilus. Both dispensed with conventional round (or less common, but still conventional, rectangular) design cues in favor of what at the time were borderline outlandish visions of what a wristwatch could look like.
Things did not really start to go bananas, however, until the approach of the turn of the century and it was then that an unruly band of iconoclasts — known collectively (and somewhat vaguely) as “independent watchmakers” — began to really shake things up, so hard that even today it’s clear watch design is never going to be the unshaken.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165673" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-Independents.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Independent High Design Watches" width="1200" height="600" />
The era of the high design watch can be plausibly dated to the late 1990s and early 2000s but there were, even before then, independent watch brands and watchmakers disrupting many conventions of traditional watch design . Some of which are now part of history, rather than the present, but many of which have survived economic and industrial turmoil to become part of the modern watchmaking world, and part of its future.
<h3>Early Independents Watchmaking: Prophets of Change</h3>
One of the earliest of these pioneers was Alain Silberstein, a designer and architect who established his company in Besançon, France, in 1990, when he introduced the outrageously colorful <a href="../shop/Alain-Silberstein-Limited-Edition-KRONO-BAUHAUS-TI.html">Krono Bauhaus</a> (and who has done a number of collaborations, including most recently with Ressence, in the <a href="https://revolutionwatch.com/grail-watch-1-ressence-x-alain-silberstein-carpe-diem/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Grail Watch 1 x Ressence “Carpe Diem”</a>).
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165677" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-Alain-Silberstein.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Alain Silberstein watches" width="1200" height="681" />
Another example from the same period comes from the work of Vianney Halter, who produced an eccentric and irresistible steampunk-style watch designed by <a href="../blog/halter-barnes-antiqua-vianney-halter-riveting-literally.html">Jeff Barnes called the Antiqua</a>, which was released in 1998. The 1990s was also the decade which saw the launch of the <a href="../blog/royal-oak-offshore-history.html">Royal Oak Offshore</a>, in 1993, a watch which took the sleek muscularity of the original design, and put it on a regimen of steroids and weight lifting.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-1165697 size-full" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-AP-1.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="" width="1200" height="848" />
The first shot fired in the new millennium was a round watch, the Ulysse Nardin Freak, which over the years has been reinvented again and again with <a href="../shop/Ulysse-Nardin-Freak-2303-270-03.html">new designs and technology</a>. The Freak is a round watch, but it’s about as far from the utilitarian sobriety of a Rolex Submariner or the genteel restraint of a Patek Calatrava as you can get. The entire movement rotates once per hour in the case, doing duty as the minute hand and “Freak” was not too strong a word, as far as a lot of the Swiss industry (and collectors internationally) thought of the watch, but it turned Ulysse Nardin into a celebrity brand overnight.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165676" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-UN-Freak.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Ulysse Nardin Freak" width="1200" height="889" />
From 2000, up until the mass extinction event of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, we got a slew of watches — mostly from the independents, although not exclusively — which were as bizarre and wonderful as anything evolution has ever come up with.
The high design watch idiom evolved rapidly. At the ripe old age of 50, a quiet-looking gentleman with all the charisma of a career accountant decided to reinvent both himself and watch design. In 2001, Richard Mille launched the RM001 Tourbillon, and the rest, as they say, is history. Not for nothing has the Richard Mille watch been called, “<a href="https://therake.com/stories/style/richard-mille-watches-the-billionaires-masonic-handshake/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Billionaire’s Handshake</a>,” and few watches have deserved the nickname more.
2001 was also the year that Harry Winston launched its Opus series of watches, which often used exceedingly complex mechanisms to display the time in exceedingly unusual ways, which often tested the limits of mechanical engineering. The Opus 3, a collaboration with Vianney Halter, had six circular windows for jumping numeral displays, and was introduced in 2003. Although it was years before a final, functional working watch could be released. Still, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t try, and during this period a lot of people (relatively speaking) were trying for a lot of crazy shots, not all of which went swish, which made it all the more exciting when something did.
<h3>Heyday of High Design Watches: Shock of the New</h3>
In 2005, a Harry Winston executive in search of greater (that is, complete, if possible) creative freedom. Armed with an obsession for manga in particular and science fiction in general, he started a company eponymously called, <a href="http://www.mbandf.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Max Büsser and Friends</a>, and produced watches representing some of the best examples of seamless integration of mechanics and aesthetics in the history of watchmaking. That is to say, the movements were, and are, as outrageously innovative as the actual designs. Over the years, these Horological Machines have become a whole category of watch design unto themselves.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165674" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-MBF.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="" width="1200" height="714" />
And then there is De Bethune. De Bethune is 20 years old this year, and of all the independent brands it is perhaps one which has evolved the most dramatically. The early DB watches, starting with the DB1, were not all that drastically different from conventional watches if you leave aside the signature ogival lugs (although they did have a breath of steampunk about them), but the most dramatic shift occurred in 2005 with the introduction of the DBS. The DBS was the first to use the company’s now-iconic triangular movement bridge, triple “pare-chute” antishock system, and circular moonphase display in the same watch and—as with MB&F—elevated mechanics to the status of aesthetic.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-1165698 size-full" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-DeBethune-1.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="" width="1200" height="812" />
While there are some very superficial similarities between the two companies, I think there are some obvious fundamental differences, with MB&F concentrating heavily on adapting the kinetic chains of the watch movement to support unusual case shapes and novel time display systems, and De Bethune creating a whole plethora of new fundamental innovations in the timekeeping components. However, neither company owns the technical innovation space at the expense of design, or vice versa. MB&F has its own share of technical inventions (<a href="https://www.mbandf.com/en/machines/legacy-machines/lmsequential-evo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">including the new Sequential Evo Chronograph</a>) and De Bethune, its own examples of radically different case shapes (<a href="https://revolutionwatch.com/introducing-the-de-bethune-dream-watch-5-tourbillon-season-1/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Dream Watch 5 timepieces</a>).
It’s impossible to be comprehensive when it comes to watches falling under the high-design rubric over the last couple decades, but I’d feel remiss in not mentioning Ressence (and not mentioning that in mentioning Ressence you also have to give a nod to Ikepod) as well as Greubel Forsey.
 
Greubel Forsey is particularly challenging, as they are of course, a high design watch company. But they’ve also fiercely innovated technically, and their movement finishing, if you want to talk about classicism for a second, is generally conceded to be some of the best on the planet. This comes at a time when a lot of other luxury watch brands, for whom excellent movement finishing throughout ought to be a given, are not holding the line on quality with as much enthusiasm as we could all hope.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1165671" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11-10-2022-Jacks-Picks-High-Design-Greubel-Forsey.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="" width="1200" height="800" />
The watch at Greubel Forsey is the movement. In a very fundamental and philosophical way, a Greubel Forsey watch is the antithesis of the traditional design approach; concealing the movement under the dial and behind an opaque caseback. In another respect, that of pursuit of quality, makes Greubel Forsey one of the most traditional brands out there.
<h3>High Watch Design: Design with a Capital D</h3>
One last thought on design: every object made by human hands is designed, in the most fundamental sense, but design can serve many masters. If you were to design airplane gauges the way De Bethune, Greubel Forsey, or MB&F design their watches you would have a catalogue of potential for major aviation disasters that would make the loss of the Hindenburg look about as dangerous as a game of musical chairs.
What we are talking about with regard to high design are watches in which design per se is the star of the show — that is, it’s not a logical consequence of the pursuit of utility so much as an overt expression of an often highly personal and very idiosyncratic philosophy of watch design, and philosophy of how we experience time. This doesn’t mean these watches are only incidentally watches, though, and to say so would be to miss the point as badly as to say that nonrepresentational art isn’t really art. Instead, they are watches that expand our notion of what it means for a watch to be a watch.
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Audemars Piguet De Bethune Greubel Forsey

Written By

Jack Forster

WatchBox Global Editorial Director Jack Forster has been fascinated by every aspect of watches, clocks, and watchmaking for his entire life. He began systematically studying and learning about watches over 20 years ago, and during the first explosion of watch enthusiast forums, he became a moderator on thepurists.com. Jack became a full-time watch writer in 2007, when he joined Revolution Magazine, first as group technical and features editor, and then as editor in chief of Revolution Magazine USA. He joined the enthusiast website Hodinkee in 2015 as managing editor and then as Editor in Chief. In 2022, Jack joined WatchBox as the Global Editorial Director. He is the author of Cartier Time Art: Mechanics of Passion, and has written about watches, and other subjects, for many other venues including CNN, American Express Departures, and Vanity Fair.

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