Indholdsfortegnelse for Vol 28 i REVOLUTION WATCH

OK, BASELWORLD, I THINK WE CAN AGREE THAT SHIT DONE GOT REAL. After the mighty watchmaking juggernaut that is the Swatch Group pulled out of your fair, taking with it all 18 of its brands and creating a massive financial hole in your balance sheet, medium-sized companies like Raymond Weil and Corum have decided to follow suit, no longer seeing the value in a trade show that is at risk of becoming an anachronism. So, can we concur that it’s time for a change? Like Khabib Nurmagomedov jumping out of the cage at UFC 229 after finishing Conor McGregor, there’s got to be some dawning sense that you may have made a tactical miscalculation here. And as a beleaguered Desi Arnaz chastising his wayward spouse Lucille Ball says: “You got…

THE DARK: HIGHLAND PARK “THE DARK” The Highland Park distillery is steeped in history and stands on a hill overlooking Kirkwall, Orkney’s main town, on an area of common land long-known as the High Park of Rosebank. Established in 1798 as an illicit distillery, Highland Park describes itself as the most northern distillery in the world, and it creates some of the most tastebud-tingling Scotch whisky. The whisky is known for being rich with notes of honey, oranges, oak, with a slightly salty nature but most intriguingly, a touch of smoke/peat. This limited edition “The Dark” is to acknowledge the autumn/winter months on the Isle of Orkney. Quoting Völuspá’s The Poetic Edda verse 6, the inscription on the side of the casing reads: “Names then gave they to noon and…

A lot of watch companies avoid using the word “fashion” because of the negative connotation it can have for people who take watches too seriously to consider them mere items of frippery. Gucci has never shied away from the F-word, though, staying true to its fashion-house roots. And watch snobs should take note: fashion watches were key to the survival of the watch industry, and Gucci played a leading role. Most readers will be aware of the part that Swatch played in the 1980s for the survival of the watch industry in Switzerland, combatting the threat of quartz from Japan by introducing Swiss quartz movements encased in a never-ending variety of colours and patterns. Swatch changed the game, bringing in a whole new era for the industry, but it was…

Panerai’s commitment to classic yachts and the regattas they frequent continues with the latest limited edition created for that series. This time, to celebrate the Panerai Transat Classique 2019, “the most extreme classic race in the world – 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean”, Panerai has announced the colourful Luminor Regatta Transat Classique, an exclusive special edition of only 150 examples. This will be an epic challenge, taking place in January 2019 when a fleet of classic yachts will set sail from Lanzarote and cross the Atlantic Ocean, finishing in St Kitts in the Caribbean Sea. The route itself will be immortalised on the caseback of each Luminor Regatta Transat Classique in the form of an engraving showing a sailing craft superimposed on a map of the Atlantic, above the…

Naming no names, but not all watch collaborations make a great deal of sense. What about Roger Dubuis and Lamborghini? Announcing the birth of their latest love-child, the Excalibur Huracàn Performante, Roger Dubuis says that the watch maison and the Lamborghini racing team are both “firmly committed to cutting-edge performance, ferocious groundbreaking technology and super-sleek aesthetics”. That may well be true, but there is something rarer that unites Lamborghini and Roger Dubuis — they were both upstarts who took one look at the very top of an established luxury industry and thought, you know what, I fancy a piece of that. Supercar giant Lamborghini may now be owned by sensible VW, with a range that is grown-up enough to include an SUV, but turn back the clock to 1963 and…

Symbols of elegance, the simplicity and purity of Bvlgari timepieces lay testament to their roots, which are set firmly in the classicism of Ancient Rome. And it is this refinement that makes the Bvlgari Bvlgari watch one of the brand’s signature models – alongside favourites such as the Octo, Lvcea and Serpenti. An archetypal watch, instantly recognisable by the logo on its bezel, the origins of the Bvlgari Bvlgari are found in a timepiece dreamt up by the three Bulgari brothers – Nicola, Gianni and Paolo – and designed by Gianni himself to personally gift to the brand’s top 100 customers in 1975. Known as the Bvlgari Roma, the watch embodied the very essence of the brand: simple, but at the same time, bold and innovative. A solid-gold case, its…

Storytelling is no doubt integral to the art of acting, but for Rosamund Pike, narration feels like something the Oscar nominee truly lives and breathes. Catching up with Pike on the eve of the BFI London Film Festival, where she was presenting a special award, the former Bond girl said: “The thing that struck me about the stories in tonight’s award was how personal they felt. It’s a personal expression and people in control of their own narratives. It makes you think why film is so vital.” Pike certainly feels like a woman in control of her own story. Revolution last interviewed the British actress in 2016, a year after her Oscar nod for playing Amy Dunne in the psychological thriller Gone Girl, (2014), and fresh from lending her voice…

You recently attended Dubai Watch Week (DWW) in London. I was surprised at the quality and quantity of British watchmakers. What is your take on the industry in the UK today? DWW is a great initiative for the watch community and holding it in London was a great chance to showcase British watchmaking. It shows that there is an interest in watchmaking around the world and that it is not uniquely Swiss. My fellow panelists, Peter Speake-Marin, Richard Stenning and I, witnessed the demise of London watchmaking when the London School of Horology was transferred from Hackney to Epping College. Funding was withdrawn in the early-2000s but thankfully a group of semi-retired students established the Epping Forest Horology Centre with support from the BHI and today it continues independently as…

Christopher Beccan is a freelance writer and photographer known for his fondness for vintage watches and whisky. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bexsonn.com a successful blog specialising in all things related to watches and “liquid gold”. Alongside his 9-5 and running Bexsonn, Christopher has written for Chrono24 and Fratello Watches and is also a photographer, working for a number of watch brands and auction houses that admire his unique style. On page 32, he introduces us to another fine watch and rare whisky pairing. Working for companies such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Breguet, watches became both a career and a passion for Adrian Hailwood. In 2011, he swapped retail for auctions, currently working as Senior Watch Specialist at Dreweatts 1759. Adrian provides watch expertise across…

In his 1973 self-portrait, Francis Bacon depicted himself leaning on a sink in a bleak Paris hotel room, prominently displaying a watch believed to be an interpretation of the Rolex GMT-Master “Pepsi” he wore for most of his adult life. The figure is twisting itself into knots and the face is deliberately blurred and disfigured as is usual in works by the man christened “Britain’s greatest 20th-century figurative artist”. The nightmarish portrait refers to an evening in 1971 when Bacon was honoured with a retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais. The story behind this portrait goes some way to explaining the violent and unearthly nature of Bacon portraits that now command in excess of £100 million at auction. The night before the Grand Palais opening, Bacon’s alcoholic erstwhile boyfriend George Dyer…

After far too long, Certina is on a roll: most people have no idea just how illustrious is this brand’s history, how innovative it was – especially with matters of ruggedness – or that it was a true manufacture. To put it another way, the “DS” in the new DS PH200M has nothing to do with, say, an equally innovate automotive design from Citroen. Here it means “Double Security”. Security against what? Water, dust and destructive shocks, because Certina – like its Swatch Group siblings Tissot, Blancpain, Longines and Omega – was known for professional diving watches in the 1960s and 1970s, and renewed efforts should return the brand to the public’s consciousness. One reason it is back in force with water-resistant timepieces is its support of the Sea Turtle…

There could have been no better place to give a sneak peek of the new 2019 Star Legacy collection than Miami, a shrine to the style and sophistication of the Art Deco period, when practical necessities combined with opulent elegance. With rapidly emerging house codes – due in no small part to the determination of Managing Director of the Watch Division, Davide Cerrato – the new Star Legacy Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph is an exercise in the contemporary execution of classic signatures such as the generous pebble-shaped case, stepped lugs and onions-haped crown. While the traditional guilloché dial has received a modern twist thanks to the exploding star motif which is emblematic of Montblanc. A tribute to the inventor of the chronograph, Nicolas Rieussec, the watch was previously available in steel…

With a brand as historically savvy as Parmigiani Fleurier, learning that its latest one-off is a tourbillon should be no surprise. What is an indicator of the age in which we live is that this breathtaking creation is also a woman’s watch, reinforcing the industry’s insistence that women are now as hungry for haute horlogerie as male customers, and that a vast gem count ain’t enough. Not that gender has anything to do with tourbillons, nor is Parmigiani as obsessed with this feature as are some others. Like Patek Philippe, Richard Mille and high-end manufacturers who do actively produce extreme women’s models (some of which, amusingly, make male customers envious), the Kalpa Tourbillon Galaxy simply exemplifies the modern attitude toward haute horlogerie for discerning, distaff clients, with no apologies for…

AERO LEATHER’S RAF BATTLE OF BRITAIN JACKET Scotland-based Aero Leather Clothing is one of the best makers of historically accurate military flight jackets. This particular model made specifically for The Rake’s collaboration with IWC is a Battle of Britain jacket. As leather became short of supply in 1940, the RAF redesigned their B-3 style jacket to use smaller panels. This jacket features russet sheepskin that has been tanned and graded then cut and constructed using precise period-correct panel work, finally being topped off with a honey fleece collar. VALSTAR DEERSKIN A1 VALSTARINO BOMBER JACKET The A-1 was the very first military flight jacket and dates back to 1926 when it was introduced as the summer flying jacket of the US Army Air Corps before being standardised for use in 1927.…

BEST MEN’S WATCH ROLEX GMT-MASTER II Time stands still when I think of you.” Cut Copy’s perceptive lyricism offers a more poetic description of the Rolex GMT-Master II than my layman’s prose ever could. There are some products that have shaped their industries, and others that have shaped industries beyond their own. The original GMT-Master, when it first emerged from the secretive labs of Switzerland’s crown jewel, did both. That’s something few can boast. The second-timezone watch democratised a watch function that held rank in the halls of high watchmaking – the world-timer. It made keeping track of time across continents convenient. It heralded an era of watch development that emphasised function over material, utility over glamour. In so doing, it became an object of glamour of its own. After…

Why is Karl-Friedrich Scheufele Revolution’s 2018 Man of the Year? Check this out. In 2016, Scheufele collected the Geneva Grand Prix’s Aiguille d’Or, the competition’s grand prize, for the ethereal Ferdinand Berthoud regulator with a low-frequency tourbillon and suspended chain and fusée. As a result, he became part of the jury for the 2017 competition where his watch, the Chopard L.U.C Full Strike, was hot in the running for the grand prize. So when it came time for the other jury members – including my friends Aurel Bacs, Eric Ku and Nick Foulkes – to discuss the Full Strike, Scheufele, ever the gentleman, excused himself so that they could remain totally impartial. They played the watch and its song was staggering. Incendiary. Transcendent. Because it was the first minute repeater…

You have officially been CEO at Baume & Mercier for six months. How are you finding it? It’s going fast. The first thing I did when I joined was to finalise the product list for SHIH 2019. And, we’ve also had two important launches – the Clifton Baumatic and the Indian. Both were global launches so there was a lot of travelling, a lot of promotion and activation. And have you made any changes yet? You know every new CEO has to make his own way, but any change has to be for a reason. I’m French, and the French have a very particular connection to Baume & Mercier so it is one of the names that I grew up with. But, obviously, working with other watch brands for the…

THE DECEMBER 2018 EDITION OF REVOLUTION UK REPRESENTS THE end of our fifth year in the British market. Back in 2013, when Revolution’s Founder Wei Koh put his team together and placed us in a cupboard-sized office in Mayfair, few of us could have guessed how much we would grow in our first half-decade. Yet, today, here we are with a floor of offices that we share with our sister magazine, The Rake, going from strength-to-strength with each issue that is published. A measure of this strength has been the launch this year of our e-commerce platform and the introduction of several very successful watch collaborations. The latest pieces in this ongoing adventure are featured in the following pages. On page 84, we tell the story behind the stunning IWC…

Junghans is a brand that appreciates history on many levels, its watches recalling vintage cars, period chronographs and aesthetic themes of the between-the-wars years. The latest force to inspire the company is architecture, with the centenary of its distinctive Philipp Jakob Manz-designed factory. “Spectacular” is one of the adjectives used to describe this incredible edifice, a terraced building in Schramberg that is regarded as one of the most impressive industrial buildings in the world to be built on a sloping site. Its scale was necessitated by the size of the company: at the beginning of the 20th century, Junghans was the largest clock manufacturer in the world. Because demand for Junghans timepieces was so great, the company required more ample workplaces in crowded Schramberg. Noted industrial architect Manz designed a…

With no false modesty – if anything, this is pure understatement – Chopard describes the L.U.C Perpetual Chrono as “the collector’s watch”. Manifestly, it will take a seasoned horophile to appreciate all that Chopard has managed to accommodate in a 45mm case. That, however, suggests the usual grand-complication/kitchen-sink approach in which a watch positively bursts with myriad functions, both useful and ludicrous. Uh-uh. Chopard is also emphasising the ethical element, making this very much a product of – no pun intended – our times. For the L.U.C Perpetual Chrono, Chopard has produced a combination that, at first, seems almost ordinary in the world of high-end watchmaking: a manually wound chronograph and a perpetual calendar. Patek Philippe and others have issued these, but while there are many from which to choose,…

Even for those who consider themselves particularly poorly educated on such matters, art has a way of sneaking up on you. The only art teacher I remember from school was a particularly cross man called Mr Brown who must have believed that frequent furious outbursts would somehow create an atmosphere that was conducive to the artistic process. It didn’t, and that was me pretty much done with the whole art thing. What I didn’t know was that the cars I was lusting after at the time — BMWs of the 1970s and 1980s — were heavily influenced by an artistic and design movement that I would later learn about in car magazines rather than art classes. Angular, functionally beautiful cars were not the only beneficiary of the Bauhaus movement, the…

Who are you going to be in the next 24 hours?” This alluring question, full of promise and anticipation, has been the tagline of Patek Philippe’s Twenty~4 Collection since 1999, seducing countless female watch lovers over the years. The Twenty~4 range has received relatively little attention in horological circles compared to the brand’s other collections, mainly due to the fact that it is equipped with… dare we say it… a quartz movement. The problem is that the words “quartz” and “Patek” are a horological oxymoron, if ever there was one. But all that changed during one balmy autumn night in the Italian city of Milan as the brand invited the world’s female journalists (and a few men for good measure) to the launch of its brand-new Twenty~4 Automatic collection. Housing…

When you think of Rado, the first quality that comes to mind is the brand’s pioneering status in case material innovation that evolved over the past half-century at a pace unmatched by any other brand. As early as 1962, Rado introduced the legendary DiaStar, a watch with a case crafted from tungsten carbide and featuring a sapphire crystal, resulting in the industry’s first scratch-resistant watch. In 1972, it unveiled the first gold-coloured DiaStar case and in 1986 introduced the first watch bracelet in ceramic. In 1990, the brand unleashed its first fully ceramic watch and in 1993 brought Ceramos–a titanium-based ceramic – into the world of watchmaking. In 1998, Rado dropped the curtain on Ceramica, the first plasma high-tech ceramic watch. In 2005, it created the incredible V10K, the world’s…

In the world of vintage watch collecting and dealing, there is a Sicilian man who all dealers and collectors alike have only positive things to say about: Roberto Randazzo – known as “Jatucka” to his friends. His knowledge is unquestionable and he is a renowned expert on a vast array of horological subjects including military watches, early Omega pieces, vintage Rolex and important chronographs. He has recently opened a new two-floor shop on South Molton Street in Mayfair, a space in the traditional Italian style of office-cum-showroom, but with the additional element of a private lounge to host clients, collector get-togethers and friends for a coffee, a glass of wine and a bite to eat. But where did this passion for watches and pure, customer-focused watch dealing come from? I…

Twice each year, the world’s foremost watch dealers and collectors descend upon the Italian city of Parma. Famous for its incredible epicurean delights including Parma ham, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and stuffed tortelli pasta, Parma is situated in the north of the country in the region of Emilia-Romagna. On the outskirts of the city lies a series of large, hangar-like halls that each spring and autumn host the Mercanteinfiera Parma. The event is vast and covers a huge array of stalls from every corner of the collecting world. Classic cars, vintage Louis Vuitton trunks, neon lights, vintage clothing, militaria… whatever you are into, there will be an area of the fair to interest you. However, for the lover of horology, of all shapes and sizes, the south-west side of Hall 6 is…