Watch news: Omega’s new dressy diver and a Bucherer experience
While Omega’s dressy diver hops time zones and date lines, fashion giant Saint Laurent makes a muse of a cult Girard-Perregaux digital from the Seventies, and London’s bricks-and-mortar retail scene gets immersive, courtesy of Bucherer.
Fully Bucherer
Garden today, you’ll be sure of a big surprise. ‘Masterworks’ is a new exhibition concept launched in horological super-retailer Bucherer’s brace of central-London boutiques. Billed as ‘a luxurious world full of wonder’, customers have the opportunity to spend some exceptionally rare me-time with a showcase of artisanal ‘masterpiece’ creations.
Masterworks draws from a curated spectrum of established brands as well as niche independents – which, given the 2,400- strong employee Lucerne family firm’s ‘comprehensive’ roster, guarantees you’ll be face-to-face with watchmaking’s finest.
Names include Bulgari, Ulysse Nardin Girard-Perregaux, and even Hermès, whose pictured ‘La Source de Pégase’ takes an iconic scarf pattern and does something far beyond a bit of silk printing. To wit: 52 baguette-cut diamonds framing a jigsaw of 800ºC-fired grand-feu champlevé enamel.
The titular pegasus’s fan-shaped wings are crafted using the ‘straw marquetry’ technique, for which an Hermès artisan individually cuts sections of dyed and dried smooth rye, assembling each strand on a gold plate.
You could take in an exhibition or a show, or you could waltz into Bucherer and witness modern works of kinetic art in a zero pressure retail environment, before they disappear into a safe forever.
Diode to joy
The ‘decade that taste forgot’ may have been challenging for mechanical watch retailers, with the advent of cheap quartz technology from the Far East, but ironically it was also the decade that Switzerland discovered… well, taste.
Case in point: Girard-Perregaux’s Casquette. Created in 1976, it broke conservative norms with its radical, tubular LED display, powered by the company’s very own ‘quartz tech’.
Not quite powerful enough to keep its Knight-Rider-red LED display constantly alight, you had to press a button to check the time, which wasn’t ideal given its side-view ‘driver’s watch’ format.
Nonetheless Saint Laurent’s creative head Anthony Vaccarello is a fan, perhaps unsurprisingly given the pared-back cool the Belgian has brought back to the Parisian maison.
Taking custom-watch tsar George Bamford’s fanboy revival for the ‘Only Watch’ auction back in 2021, Vaccarello is running with the Casquette 2.0 Saint-Laurent 01’ in black ceramic and black PVDtreated grade 5 titanium, available in a scant 100 pieces via Rive Droite stores in Paris and Los Angeles. Casquette if you can.
- £5,105, ysl.com
Into the green
“These watches are like a call to action,” enthuses Omega CEO, Raynald Aeschlimann, with characteristic verve, “So go for it! Step out into the world!”
You could do much worse, admittedly. Three dressy takes on Commander James Bond’s go-to field watch, the fittingly amphibian Aqua Terra, now have something special in common: a unique ‘worldtimer’ display, its North Pole forming the axis of each hand.
The Seamaster Aqua Terra 150M Co-Axial Master Chronometer GMT Worldtimer 43mm (to give it its full, super-catchy title) is a bona fide waterbaby, good down to depths of 150m, yet still tricked out with ‘true’ world-time functionality rather than simply a secondary 24-hour ‘GMT’ hand.
A 24-hour ring, demarcated into night and day sections, allows you to read the time in any of 24 time-zones, no matter where you’ve pitched up (adjusting for local time first, of course).
Where normally CET would be marked as ‘Paris’, you’ll find the watch’s Swiss birthplace, ‘Bienne’ instead.
But the main event is undoubtedly that laser-ablated northern hemisphere, topographically etched into grade 5 titanium and imperceptibly domed to mimic the curvature of the Earth.
Adding shine to the dial are hands and indexes in Omega’s proprietary ‘Moonshine Gold’: the gently glowing 18-carat alloy.
- £9,900, omegawatches.com