A unique artwork by Spanish artist and OROLOG watch creator Jaime Hayon celebrates innovative design
By Nick Foulkes
November 07, 2015 08:00
I'm old enough to remember the Eighties, when we had just learned to use the word “designer” adjectivally. From designer stubble to designer beer, it was applied to nouns with a profligacy and wantonness that was positively indecent.
What makes that decade look stupid (stonewashed denim aside) is that pretty much everything around us is designed – the only issue is the amount of care that’s gone into that process. And thanks to the work of design evangelists, most notably Sir Terence Conran, we’ve all been encouraged to care rather more – and now we are learning to care more about the design of watches.
For much of this century, case design has been at the service of the mechanism. As watches became ever more complex and the younger consumer chose to brandish what they believed to be the modernity of their timepieces by flaunting their mechanical obviousness, the case
of a watch became little more than one of those skintight T-shirts worn by bodybuilders, enabling the sculpted six-pack (or, in this case quintuple-axis triple tourbillons) to be readily appreciated.
In fact, to take the analogy of the male torso a tad further, the desire to show off the “muscles” of a timepiece saw watch design stripped down until, like Poldark at work scything in the field, it was working naked to the waist.
This sort of design was no more than a skin job, an exercise in clothing the movement as minimally as possible, and making the mechanical attributes as obvious as possible.
Holes were punched in dials almost at random and contusions sprouted in crystal and case-wall to accommodate the micromechanical floor show.
And given that the first decade of this century was a period in which the horological dictionary defined “bigger” as “better”, cases were allowed to sprawl over the wrist and rise ever upwards like a mechanical Tower of Babel. Complication after complication piled up, hamburger-like, one atop the other.
Now, of course, the pendulum has made its return journey and the aesthetics of watch design are more important than they have been for a generation. Over the past couple of years ever-inventive watchmakers have been coming up with new and increasingly exotic métiers d’art, just as assiduously as they once came up with new complications.
I serve on the jury of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève and there
is a category devoted to what are called “artistic crafts”. Once a dying art, enamelling is becoming the tourbillon, so to speak, of aesthetic-era watchmaking, making stars of a handful of exceptional artisans.
Elsewhere, recondite branches of the applied arts such as flower-petal marquetry (Cartier), straw marquetry (Cartier and Hermès), paperweight making (Hermès), Japanese aka-e painting (Hermès), and embroidery (Hublot, Chanel and Piaget), among others, are being used on watches.
Today we assess timepieces according to different criteria, and look at them with new eyes. In men’s watches the word “elegant” has been hauled from obscurity, dusted down and put back to work. I must admit
to being somewhat biased in favour of this shift in emphasis. I like a big watch as much as the next man, but throughout the horological gluttony of the late Nineties and Noughties, I also kept my eye open for old, postage-stamp-sized Cartiers as well as Pateks and Vacherons of coin-like dimensions, believing that keeping one’s eye on vintage pieces is a useful way of getting to grips with the return to elegant, simpler watches.
Vacheron Constantin has been something of a leader in this with its Historiques, a collection of icon models of the past. And when talking of the glories of the past, mention has to be made of the Collection Privée Cartier Paris; even though it must be quite some time since the last CPCP was issued, as a body of work it still stands as eloquent testimony to Cartier’s historic mastery of the elegant watch. I still hope that one
day CPCP will be reborn.
CPCP and Les Historiques are both elite production runs, but the rebirth of Tudor shows that popular success can also result from a design approach that has studied a marque’s past with a forensic eye and then transferred the detailing and the desirability to contemporary, heritage-inspired models. Mechanically, there may be no pyrotechnics at Tudor, but the care that has gone into choosing fonts, colours, tones, finishes, hand shapes, crown size and so forth has been responded to warmly.
And with mechanical simplicity has come an increased attention to other parts of the watch. I was much taken by Ralph Lauren’s watches this year. The label’s strength is Ralph himself, and one can see his touch in the fancy lug arrangement of the 867 Tuxedo model, which transforms an otherwise rather discreet square watch into something truly eye-catching.
But perhaps the real gift of the new design age is that we are looking more closely at what is on our wrists. Long before watches achieved any useful level of accuracy, they were objects of beauty. Without all the bells, whistles, and obsession with multi-functionality to distract us, we can appreciate that beauty anew.
I was at the Patek Philippe salon in Geneva the other day talking to director Patrick Cremers about one of my favourite watches, the 5940 perpetual calendar. It is a beautiful cushion-cased watch, powered by the legendary Calibre 240 Q and for 10 minutes we talked about the difference between the way that the minute indices appeared on the white-and yellow-gold versions: the latter has a chemin de fer minute track, the former has simple dots.
If nothing else, the dawn of the new designer age of watches is teaching
us that there is a world of detail to explore at the end of our arms.
Nick Foulkes is editor of Vanity Fair On Time
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/watch ... esign.html
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