With the world on lockdown, the Watches & Wonders watch fair – what used to be known more opaguely as the SIHH, comprising haut de gamme brands such as Cartier, Vacheron Constantin and Jaeger-LeCoultre, now given a zingy reboot for 2020 – has moved online.
New watches from 30 brands are announced today on the new Watches & Wonders portal. Most prices are not available yet, but here is our pick of the newest and biggest horological hitters.
Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept
Setting records in slimline watchmaking is pretty much baked into Piaget’s brand DNA – it first made waves in 1957, with the original Altiplano, whose 9P movement was just 2mm thick, and in the modern era it’s set plenty of records for thinnest watches of various types and complications.
Recently, however, Bulgari has been setting the thin-watch agenda with its ground-breaking Finissmo creations, but Piaget has stolen back the crown in some style with the Altiplano Ultimate Concept – quite simply, the skinniest mechanical watch ever made, and it’s difficult to imagine things ever getting thinner, at 2mm for the entire cased-up watch. That’s the same depth as the movement inside the original ‘57 Altiplano, and equivalent to a couple of credit cards stacked together.
Piaget presented the Ultimate Concept in 2018 – but then it really was just a concept. A couple of years on and it’s in production, with the brand able to create around five pieces a year – it’s that tricky. In fact, the case and movement are one-and-the-same, made up of 167 microscopic individual parts, while a special, wafer-thin crystal had to be developed to be able to sit within the watch with space for the hands and wheels to move beneath.
There are five patents attached to the watch, including the use of a new, cobalt-based alloy for the case, which is simply too thin for gold to work. There’s just 0.12mm of cobalt between the movement and the wearer’s skin.
If owning one of five pieces produced annually of the thinnest watch ever wasn’t exclusivity enough, Piaget has also made the Altiplano Ultimate Concept completely customisable, with a variety of colour and finish combinations for different parts of the watch that according to Piaget amount to 10,000 permutations.
Panerai Luminor Marina Fibratech 44mm
Panerai has spent the past few years getting deep into materials science in watchmaking, incorporating concoctions such as Carbotech (a carbon-fibre composite), BMG-Tech (a metallic glass) and synthetic ceramics. This year it’s merging its latest development, Fibratech – a composite used in the aerospace industry, made from ‘unidirectional mineral fibres produced by the fusion of basalt rock’, no less – with one of its original innovations: the introduction of tritium-based luminous materials all the way back in 1949/1950.
That gave rise the brand’s burly, emblematic Luminor watch design, which is now kitted out in a livery of modern-day luminescent material, Super-Luminova X1, which not only inhabits the dial markings but rings the dial itself, while also marking the famous semi-circular crown-guard and even the stitching of the strap itself. The Fibratech case has a grey, utilitarian finish and is described as 60 per cent lighter than steel. The watch is limited to 270 editions, available exclusively from Panerai boutiques.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Grand Complication Split-seconds chronograph
Having made the world’s most complicated watch back in 2015, the Reference 57260 pocket watch, Vacheron is flexing its profound horological muscles once more with this mind-boggling one-off creation. This is a double-sided watch that displays the chronograph hours and measurements on the front, along with a perpetual calendar, across four double-register sub-dials.
On the reverse are astronomical indications including solar time, equation of time, sunrise and sunset, day and night duration, plus the phases of the moon. Throw in a tourbillon and – hey, why not? – a minute repeater, complications that often come with six-figure price points in their own right, and you’ve got 24 complications in a movement with no fewer than 1,163 parts.
Montblanc 1858 Automatic 24H
Montblanc maps out a piece of adventure-watch whimsy with this steel-and-bronze curio. The brand has developed its rugged, retro-influenced 1858 collection to tap into a kind of old-school outward-bound aesthetic, which it takes to the extreme with a single-hand wristwatch that looks more like a compass than a timekeeper. And indeed, it can be used as such.
Cased in steel with a rugged bronze bezel and crown, the watch’s red indicator moves around a 24-hour dial, with 12 at the top of the dial and 24 at the bottom. Around the outer edge of the dial is a compass scale with markers every 5 degrees, and cardinal point in red. As any old soldier will tell you, rotating a watch horizontally to point the extremity of the hour hand in the direction of the sun enables you to use it as a basic compass, something that Montblanc is here simply bringing to the fore. Something to help you navigate the local park on your government-sanctioned exercise routine.
Cartier Pasha de Cartier Skeleton
Cartier is breathing new life into its 1980s favourite, the square-in-a-circle Pasha, a sports-luxe piece designed by the famous horological conceptor Gerald Genta. The new generation Pasha comes in a host of variations and configurations, with upgrades including slightly beefed-up dimensions, movements that are resistant to magnetism – increasingly a de rigueur facet of high-spec sports watches – and interchangeable straps and bracelets. The most striking iteration is this skeletonised version, combining Cartier’s dexterity in ultra-refined skeletonisation of watch movements with the flexibility of a steel sports watch.
IWC Portugieser Yacht Club Moon & Tide
If a compass facility isn’t something you often see in a wristwatch, nor is the ability to display tide times – something to which IWC has taken an eye-catching approach with this ticker for superyacht-owners everywhere. A subdial at 6 o’clock indicates the expected times for the next high and low tide, while a double moon phase – a speciality of IWC’s perpetual calendar models – at 12 o’clock also shows spring and neap tides (spring tides, which bring particularly high water, occur at full moon and new moon). Cased in rose gold, and containing a newly developed movement module for the tide display, the Moon & Tide is the showpiece for the brand’s revamped nautical Portugieser Yacht Club collection.
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