The Watch Snob Takes On SIHH

SIHH 2013

“Lange & Söhne could almost do no wrong once again, with its impressive 1815 Up/Down and Perpetual Calendar Rattrapante Chronograph being two highlights of the entire show.“

The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie is about the only reason to brave the slush and ice of Geneva in January, unless one is passing through on the way to Courmayeur for a week of skiing. Even then, the city is awash in Eurotrash, with their knotted scarves and trendy spectacles and women in faux fur and knee-high riding boots. The elevated pretension quotient is almost too much to bear. But it is also the only week when one can see all the Richemont brands’ new watches in one place and is a far more pleasant experience than the scrum that is BaselWorld. So there I was, braving the bloggers, overfed retailers and grovelling PR reps to see what new timepieces Johann Rupert’s brood had to offer.

Occupying the majority of square footage in Palexpo Halle 6, and rightly so, was Cartier. After all, the brand is the sugar daddy for all of Richemont, and it knows it. But Cartier’s confidence is justified — the company has been one of the bright spots in high watchmaking the past few years, and this year it did not disappoint. The Mysterieuse timepieces were nothing short of fascinating, continuing Cartier’s tradition in the niche space of floating hands and tourbillons. Of course, looking at these pieces and actually wearing them are two different things. Since the majority of the watch is transparent, anyone owning one of these watches should wax his arms daily, lest the mesmerising vision of watch hands floating in space is marred by a backdrop of matted wrist hair.

Cartier also introduced its first-ever in-house chronograph calibre, which, while impressive enough, resides in one of the most attractive sports chronographs I have seen in some time. I suspect the Calibre de Cartier Chronographe will be eating Breitling’s lunch for the foreseeable future.

Over at Jaeger-LeCoultre, the overachieving brand continues its winning ways with three pieces celebrating the company’s 180 years in business. While the Francophonic mouthfuls that are the Master Grande Tradition Gyrotourbillon 3 Jubilee and the Master Grande Tradition Tourbillon Cylindrique are impressive bits of haute horlogerie, it was the Master Ultra-Thin Jubilee that inspired me to pull out my Centurion Card. It is the epitome of understatement, and one of the loveliest of thin timepieces in the tradition for which Jaeger is known.

Parmigiani continues to produce gorgeous watches that no one really cares about. Van Cleef and Arpels doesn’t have a single piece worth mentioning on a site called AskMen, and the tourbillon wizards at Greubel Forsey showed a watch called Art Piece No. 1 that contains a micro-sculpture of a three-masted ship that could fit inside the eye of a needle. If this artsy triumvirate sells more than a hundred watches per year between them, they’re doing well and probably exist merely due to the charity of Cartier.

Lange & Söhne could almost do no wrong once again, with its impressive 1815 Up/Down and Perpetual Calendar Rattrapante Chronograph being two highlights of the entire show. But it stumbled a bit with the Grande Lange 1 Lumen, which is trying to be a sports watch for a brand that just doesn’t need one. The otherwise impressive Grande Complication, the company’s most complicated timepiece ever, suffers from a grossly oversized 50-millimeter case. But seeing as it is only making one per year for the next six years, I’m still sure it won’t have a problem selling them all, even at $2 million each.

Then there are the brands headed by that circus ringleader, Georges Kern: Roger Dubuis and IWC Schaffhausen. Both could be identified at SIHH by their outrageous booths. Dubuis looked like a bad mashup of Dungeons and Dragons and Game of Thrones, with a giant eagle sculpture in the middle and wandering attendants wearing leather tunics and carrying rather unhappy live eagles that scared passersby and defiled the booth with their guano. Roger Dubuis likes to make sure everyone knows that it’s the only brand whose watches all carry the Geneva Seal, and that phrase was repeated like a mantra by all the aforementioned tunic’d minstrels to anyone within earshot. It’s new Excalibur (more Dungeons and Dragons references) Quatuor, with its four opposing sprung balances, would be impressive on its own if not accompanied by a hokey video of screaming animated eagles.Down the hall was IWC, that pumped-up, blustering macho brand, elbowing its way to the front for attention. Race cars, pretty young things in short dresses and, oh, yes, a few watches, were on display in its booth. This year, IWC reinvented the nerdy Ingenieur line as an auto-racing watch (why not?), and while there are some interesting pieces in the collection, the brand doesn’t feel it can stand on its own merits and surrounds them with much fanfare and props.

The other usual suspects were present also. Montblanc, the hardest-working brand in the business had some impressive watches. Panerai actually introduced a reasonably-sized watch, which had some wondering if the Mayans were just a month off in their predictions. Ralph Lauren continues to put its Richemont siblings’ movements in its fashion watch cases. And Baume & Mercier is showing signs of life and may be a brand I could actually recommend to the stingy readers who write me week after week.

All in all, it was a fairly quiet year at SIHH, which isn’t a bad thing. In sports, I believe they would call a year like this a “rebuilding year.” By the end of the week, I was quite happy to escape the madding crowd and decamp for a week of perfecting my stem Christie turns, while attempting to forget about watches for a few days. At least now I can.