If one trend is currently dominating the world of watchmaking, hard stone dials might be it. Look around the recent launches and you’ll see them everywhere.

Whereas big names such as Cartier, Bulgari and Rolex seem mostly to return to the stones that first cemented their status as paragons of the genre (lapis, malachite, turquoise, tiger’s eye and onyx), independent makers tend to be less orthodox, introducing watch aficionados to ruby root, charoite or moss agate.

There are few dial materials that I would choose over hardstone. Give me tiger iron over another gradient lacquer, lapis lazuli over another shade of sunburst blue or carnelian over another textured finish inspired by linen, sand or hammered metal.

It is not that I don't admire those techniques — or the craftsmanship behind them — but the fact is that no matter how skilled the artisan, they are still competing against something nature perfected millions of years ago.

Perhaps that is why stone dials feel so relevant today, in an age where watchmaking has become defined by technical progress. Every year brings advanced escapements, new alloys and increasingly elaborate finishes, each promising to produce something no one has seen before. Yet one of the industry's most compelling design stories has come from slices of ornamental stone that existed before civilisation.

‘The thing I like with hardstone,’ says Emmanuel Gueit of Dennison, who has previously designed for Rolex, Harry Winston and Hermès, ‘is that every single dial is unique. We take the raw stone and cut it wherever we can — and they are all different.’

For Gueit, who also works with Tiffany, that individuality has little to do with price and everything to do with design. ‘I'm interested in new materials,’ he says. ‘We've seen ceramics and all sorts of innovations over the past 20 years — and I admire them — but when I think about luxury, I keep coming back to materials that come from the ground.’

The apparent simplicity of a hardstone dial belies one of the most demanding manufacturing processes in watchmaking. Every dial begins with a carefully selected block of mineral that is assessed for colour, pattern and structural integrity and later sliced into sheets, often little more than half a millimetre thick. Many never progress beyond this stage — even a spectacular pattern can conceal a hidden fault. A section that is structurally perfect, meanwhile, may simply lack the visual balance that is required for it to stand out.

Once selected, the stone is bonded to a metal base before being drilled for the hands, cut for complications such as the date and fitted with indices. Every operation runs the risk of reducing the material to fragments.

Where this was once the preserve of the great jewellery maisons, smaller, more boutique brands are now having a go. Names such as Christopher Ward and Frederique Constant are making natural stone available to collectors who, until recently, might only have admired it from afar. Through them, hardstone is not only becoming more financially accessible but seeing its very definition broadened in real time.

As Christopher Ward's Biel-based product director, Jörg Bader, puts it: ‘Our role is not to lecture collectors: it is to spark curiosity.’ For Bader, the objective is not to imitate haute horlogerie at a lower price, but to introduce collectors to natural materials that they might otherwise ignore. ‘If someone buys one of these watches because they fall in love with the colour or pattern, then discovers the remarkable story behind the stone itself, that is a wonderful outcome.’

At the helm of the stone-dial watch’s revival is Piaget — which, over time, has become the maison most closely associated with the style. The brand never abandoned its belief in ornamental stone, just as its purveyors have never faltered in their remarkable appreciation for Piaget’s vintage creations: think of the 15102, a watch known for its galvanic anthracite dial, or the asymmetrical timepiece that would later be known as the Limelight Gala.

These were watches, after all, worn to the most glamorous events of the day, by the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol and Sophia Loren.

Although tempting to conclude that Piaget invented the hard-stone dial, the reality is rather more complex. The stone dial first ascended in the late 1960s and 1970s, its story shaped not by one house, but by a shared appetite for experimentation. Piaget produced some of the era’s defining models, pairing slices of malachite, lapis lazuli, jade and coral with ultra-thin movements and sculptural gold bracelets.

At about the same time, Chopard was creating equally accomplished stone dials and Cartier was incorporating ornamental stone into both jewellery watches and icons such as the Tank. Rolex, too, was experimenting with jasper, malachite and other natural materials in its most prestigious collections.

‘The 1970s was a period of remarkable creative freedom in watchmaking and jewellery,’ a spokesperson for Chopard explains. ‘Designers were moving away from convention, embracing bold colours, sculptural forms and unexpected materials.’ For the house, stones transformed the watch from a functional object into wearable art — a philosophy that continues to shape them today.

What has changed is not the material, but the speed at which ideas now spread. Fifty years ago, several brands arrived at similar conclusions through a common cultural consensus. Today, inspiration travels instantly. A handful of influential launches, strengthened by auctions, collectors and social media, has been enough to encourage brands to reboot the stone dial across the board.

Perhaps this is why the second gold rush feels so different from the first: the revival of the stone dial is no longer confined to a handful of household names. Trends come and go, colours rise and fall, materials drift in and out of fashion, but nature’s offering seems to endure as the watchmaker’s eternal muse.

Ralph Lauren the man has always been good at uniting the most unlikely groups of people. Who else, when you think about it, could create not just clothes, but really good clothes for an English country-house owner, an East Coast WASP and a Texan billionaire — at the same time?

He did it again, in 2008, when he made a serious move into watchmaking, partnering with luxury goods conglomerate Richemont who own IWC Schaffhausen, Piaget and Vacheron Constantin — the world's oldest continuously operating watch manufacturer — among others.

On the surface of it, the American West, which has long been a part of Lauren’s design vocabulary, isn’t the natural companion to Switzerland’s centuries-old, strictly governed horological processes. However, come together they did with the launch of the original American Western Cushion collection, in 2018, to mark Ralph Lauren the brand’s 50th anniversary. The 42-millimetre case was available in antiqued sterling silver or 18-carat rose gold, inspired by the vintage concho and rodeo belts that Lauren collects, wears, makes and sells.

Now, the Western Cushion’s been rereleased with some important updates, including to the case, which has shrunk by four millimetres — enough to feel more refined without compromising the wearer’s ability to appreciate the delicate engraving. The most notable change is that the watch is available in three iterations: off-white lacquer, the closest to the original one’s vintage sensibility, a more-modern black lacquer and natural turquoise, a material which some Native American tribes regard as sacred, or a piece of the sky fallen to Earth.

But for all its cowboy credentials, this is an accessory with a decidedly international outlook. Its leather strap is hand-tooled in Texas, then burnished in Italy, while the silver case and buckle are hand-engraved and aged in New York City. The face is stamped with Roman and Arabic numerals, complemented by Breguet-style hands (Abraham-Louis Breguet was French). The movement, meanwhile, is made in Switzerland, by Piaget, exclusively for Ralph Lauren.

For Lauren, it has always been about bringing together the best of all worlds.

The Ralph Lauren American Western Cushion collection is available from $26,000. Visit the Ralph Lauren website for more information

A collection of highly sought-after watches will head to auction after being seized by HMRC during a major investigation into multi-million-pound payroll fraud. Their previous owner clearly had an eye for horology, but not for their tax obligations.

The five watches — a Philippe Dufour Simplicity, a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph, two Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks and an Omega Speedmaster Racing — are thought to be worth around £1 million, although the final tally could be considerably higher.

Leading the collection is the Philippe Dufour Simplicity, widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in independent watchmaking and among the most coveted watches on the collector market. First unveiled in 2000, it was a deliberate departure from the horological wizardry for which Dufour was known. His aim was to prove that simplicity, far from being the enemy of sophistication, could be its ultimate expression. Each iteration, like all of Dufour’s other creations, was hand-finished and assembled by him. In 2021, a 2004 model CHF756,000 (about £685,000) against a CHF250,000–500,000 estimate. Not bad for a watch whose greatest trick is making the complicated look deceptively simple.

The rest of the line-up is hardly small change. The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar Split-Seconds Chronograph combines two of traditional watchmaking’s most demanding complications, while the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak helped turn the humble steel sports watch into a luxury icon. One of the two available to bid on is a Flying Tourbillon ‘Premier’ model, from a limited edition of just 10 pieces. The Omega Speedmaster Racing, meanwhile, brings a little motorsport pedigree to proceedings.

As with all Unreserved Government Auctions, every lot will sell, whatever the final hammer price. For once, time really is money — and the countdown is on.

The Unreserved Government Auction is with Wilsons Auctions. A range of Rolex watches and jewellery completes the sale. Click here for more information and to register to bid.

The Hanhart 417 and 417 ES chronograph had two important customers. The German army — specifically its pilots — and Steve McQueen. Quite how a 417 ES ended up on the wrist of one of America's most famous actors in the early 1960s is anyone's guess.

Despite being one of his favourite timepieces, it didn’t, however, come with huge fanfare like his TAG Heuer Monaco moment in the 1971 film Le Mans. Instead, its use was documented in family photographs.

'It was always assumed that my grandfather acquired the watch somewhere around The Great Escape time,' says his grandson, Chase McQueen. 'As we were going through the archives and talking to my grandmother [Neile Adams], we actually figured out that he probably acquired it somewhere in late 1960 or early 1961, because he's wearing the watch in a little known movie called The War Lover, where he plays a bomber pilot named Buzz Rickson. If you look, you can see the Hanhart watch in that film, so we know he discovered that watch at least two years before The Great Escape.'

Nearly 70 years on, Hanhart has released its first official Steve McQueen edition, developed in collaboration with Chase and his sister Madison McQueen. 'Projects like this are important to us,' Chase says. 'Not only is it a way for us to discover our family history and who my grandfather was, but it’s a way for younger generations to understand why he was so cool and to be able to touch and feel and see some of the things that made him who he was.'

The 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition No.1 (about £2,185) is limited to just 300 examples worldwide. The McQueen family was keen for the replica to look as original as possible — with subtle nods to their grandfather, including his signature. Throughout the process the team referred to various photographs and films. The goal was to balance authenticity and modernity, in order to bring the right mixture of 1960s and 2020s together. The final watch features a historic Hanhart logo and aged radium lume — so the hands and numerals illuminate in a warm hue reminiscent of the time period.

'The most difficult part was that we don’t have high resolution photos from the 1960s,' says Felix Wallner, joint CEO of Hanhart. 'When zooming in, we saw some images where we think the lower line says "shockproof", so we put the signature there. In addition, we looked closely at the strap because we wanted to rebuild it as good as we could. In the colour photos, you can see that the strap he wore was a very dark brown cuff strap.'

The contemporary strap is made from a material called Shell Cordovan, by Italian tannery Comipel. The horse leather is said to be four times more robust than cow leather. An exhibition case back means that the wearer can see the flyback mechanism dancing away in the hand-wound piece.

One of Hanhart's chronograph's best-known identifiers is the red pusher — and this special-edition timepiece is no different. According to company legend, a pilot's wife painted his pusher red so that he would think of her when he used it — and come home safe. (The boring reality is that pressing the pusher resets the time, so it was painted red to warn off pilots from pushing it unnecessarily.)

In a nod to the romantic tale, each Steve McQueen edition comes with a bottle of red nail polish, concealed in the box underneath a plaque bearing the example’s number. It’s also accompanied by an ‘official timekeeping licence’, inspired by McQueen’s 1964 international racing license. The original document sold at auction in 2009 for $42,700. Hanhart’s version is signed by the individual watchmaker, and Chase and Madison McQueen.

The company crafts its watches in Germany's Black Forest, surrounded by steep hills studded with sheep, goats and cows. In McQueen’s honour, I cut through this perfectly peaceful environment in a 1969 Corvette Stingray while wearing a Limited Edition No.1 — in the name of journalism and to get a taste of what he would have felt, all those years ago. Despite its 39-millimetre case concealing my entire wrist, I felt like Stevia McQueen — a zero-calorie version of the King of Cool.

The watch and the car are icons today, but neither was that popular in their own time. The 417 ES was not available to purchase in the USA; the Stingray was overshadowed by the likes of the Mustang and Camaro, with less than 40,000 ever made in the 1960s. It’s a nostalgia for that era and the lore of legends who spotted their potential in the first place that has since changed things.

In, The Great Escape, McQueen’s character, Hilts, spend most of his time trying to reach the Swiss border — less than two hours from Hanhart's headquarters. This inspired some intrusive thoughts of disappearing into Switzerland with a classic Corvette and a one-of-300 timepiece, but the reality of Chevrolet’s 1960's engineering soon put an end to that scheme.

The Stingray, though gorgeous, is definitely more a case of form over function. Its brakes feel more like a suggestion than a certainty. Very little happens when you turn the steering wheel, and the automatic gearbox frantically scrambles around for the next gear. It is the utter antithesis of Hanhart’s precision horology.

The 417 ES is German engineering, top-to-bottom. It will take some time to break in, like a new recruit’s first pair of marching boots, but it keeps the cold watch back from your wrist.

'While we were simultaneously working with Felix, I would run to my grandmother [Neile] and ask her because she was the one who was around and was there when he had the original, and she gave me a great quote,' says Chase. 'She said, "You know, I'm sorry, honey, I'm 94, I don't know where that watch ended up, but I can tell you, he f***ing loved that watch."'

Patek Philippe’s seventh ‘Watch Art’ Grand Exhibition begins in the Italian city on Friday and will showcase hundreds of watches and clocks, but the biggest draws will be the Swiss watchmaker’s Calibre 89, Star Calibre 2000 and Grandmaster Chime, a trio of so-called ‘supercomplications’.

The Calibre 89 pocket watch became the world’s most complicated mechanical watch when it was unveiled in 1989 to mark Patek Philippe’s 150th anniversary. With 33 complications — or functions — including a star chart, a thermometer, an indication showing when Easter falls and various chiming functions, it remains the Genevan company’s most complex watch.

Five years went into its development and a further four bringing its 1,728 components together. Only four examples were ever made, one each in white, yellow and rose gold and a fourth in platinum. Weighing almost a kilogram, the watch was huge, but it was designed for deep pockets. The last Calibre 89 sale was in 2009, when the yellow-gold version hammered at just over $5 million (around $7.5 million today).

As its name suggests, the Star Calibre 2000 was introduced for the Millennium. This was a pocket watch, too, with a comparatively modest 21 complications. Even so, collectors often view it with greater reverence: the Star Calibre 2000 solved a number of complex horological problems and was awarded six patents, one of which was for an indicator that tracks sunrise and sunset times. It was also the first chiming watch to accurately replicate the melody of London’s Big Ben.

Five sets of four were made, four in gold and platinum, and a fifth in only platinum. The first time a set came up for auction was in December last year, when Sotheby’s sold one of the mixed metal sets for a cool $11.9 million.

The Grandmaster Chime Ref. 5175 was created for Patek’s 175th anniversary in 2014 and has 20 complications, making it Patek’s most complex watch for the wrist. Two of the heavily engraved reversible gold wristwatch’s functions were patented; an alarm that strikes the time in full when it goes off, and another chiming function that sounds the date on demand.

It’s said a Grandmaster Chime took more than 100,000 hours to produce, which explains why only seven were made, one of which has crossed the Alps to Milan from Patek’s Geneva museum. None of the original seven has ever come up for auction, although two years ago Sylvester Stallone sold his Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300, a follow-up variant released in 2016, at Sotheby’s in New York for $5.4 million.

Patek’s exhibition runs until October 18 at Milan’s late-Art Nouveau Palazzo delle Scintille, now known as CityOval. Entry is free with registration and covers access to 15 rooms full of Patek watches, including the current collection and a special range of Italian-themed clocks and watches produced exclusively for the event.

For more information, visit the Patek website.

Jeff Koons is looking on the bright side. ‘I think we have an amazing future ahead of us,’ says one of the world’s most successful living artists, eyes twinkling. ‘AI is affecting us in the most positive ways imaginable.’

Jeff’s view is not a popular one. It’s a warm September day in New York City, his home, and the morning’s papers are forecasting AI will usher in the end of humanity only years from now. We’re discussing the launch of his latest collaboration, this time with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot.

‘This collaboration lets me celebrate the challenges and opportunities we have with [AI] and to be open to the future,’ he continues, pawing the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, a limited-edition version of Hublot’s sports watch, now physically enhanced by the pneumatic design codes made famous by his shiny, rather ubiquitous 'Balloon Dog' sculptures.

Unlike the pessimists and, it seems, even some of the billionaire tech bros, Jeff says he’s free of the anxieties of a world overrun by killer robots. ‘I believe in practising the removal of judgement and being open to acceptance of everything,’ he explains. ‘If you practise acceptance, everything’s perfect in its own being, and that’s total empowerment. Judgement creates anxiety, and anxiety creates fear, so you become disengaged, and that creates disempowerment.’

Acceptance, continues the 71-year-old, is fuel for ‘awe and wonderment’. But isn’t judgement a critical part of what makes us human, of what helps us distinguish right from wrong? ‘There are some places for judgement,’ he says, clarifying. ‘You have to make decisions. But being open to everything is how you walk out of Plato’s Cave. If you remove anxiety and fear, you’re able to have higher consciousness.’

Per the allegory, said cave is one we only walk out of with education, and Jeff is eager to impress what he has learned, and what his 'Balloon Dog' sculptures — and his new watch — might teach us. ‘If you think of a balloon animal, the outside membrane is interacting with the external world,’ he begins. ‘If you had a balloon here, you would feel like the inside was vacuous, empty, and the outside world you would feel has more density.

‘In our own being, we’re like an inflatable, but we’re dense inside,’ he continues. ‘We have blood, organs, and the vacuous part is outside. So when we look at a balloon animal, there’s a reversal, and it gives us a sense of confidence to be engaged in the external world. You feel more safety within your own being.’

The narrative deepens. ‘There’s a profoundness in the dialogue,’ he goes on, still referring to the inside-outside meaning behind his mirror-like stainless steel sculptures of the childhood object. ‘There’s life and death. Take a deep breath and it’s a symbol of optimism and life energy, and then there’s one’s last breath, exhaling, a symbol of death.’

The watch, he says, conveys the same idea, albeit in a slightly more private way than would be true of a towering public sculpture. Every surface of the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons is somehow inflated and cartoonish. Even the dial is undulating, like the inside of a bouncy castle, and the strap is puffy, too. The second-hand counterbalance carries a tiny moulded Balloon Dog, so small it’s barely visible to the naked eye.

‘At death, we deflate,’ Jeff says, without intending to burst his own balloon. ‘But the watch will remain permanently inflated. Time is passing, but optimism is remaining.’

Jeff moved to New York in the late 1970s (initially as a commodities broker) after art school, and has since become one of the world’s most influential artists. His work, which typically elevates the everyday into something more extraordinary, has explored themes such as seduction, banality, consumerism and self-promotion, all of which are as apparent in his first collaboration with Hublot as those that examine our mortality.

The Balloon Dog watch comes in 42 millimetres of stainless steel, finished either in a matte metallic red or blue, or a chrome-like finish buffed to mirror levels of sheen. These sit alongside a fourth and far more technical piece, a spin on an esoteric Hublot design called MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons. Sitting a full two centimeters off the wrist, its octagonal form is hewn from a single block of sapphire crystal, one of the world’s hardest materials, and houses concentric rings of diamonds and blue sapphires wrapped around a tourbillon mechanism made almost invisible by the translucent blue dome above it.

Even while the MP-14 Origin is large — huge — in wristwatch terms, it’s tiny by comparison to his’ 12-foot-high Balloon Dog (Orange), a piece sold by Christie’s New York for $58.4 million in 2013. Even Rabbit, a 41-inch high stainless steel sculpture that became the world’s most expensive piece sold by a living artist when it went under the hammer for $91.1 million in 2019, would dwarf it.

But scale, Jeff says, is easily surmountable, and collaborations such as this give him room to prove it. ‘Plato would always say that in making a work of art, the first thing you have to deal with is scale,’ he says. ‘If I’m making a traditional piece, I start to make maquettes and cutouts. But it’s all embedded within us, scaled within our mind. And so with pieces like these Hublot watches, I find a major part is internal, profoundly within.’

The detailing in the watches is extreme. Hublot’s production head is in New York, too, and he admits quietly that the dial alone required significant trial and error during the two-year period that spanned the brand’s first meeting with Jeff and the delivery of the new watches.

How does he know when a piece — or a watch — is finished? ‘You take something as far as you can, and then at a certain point you just have to let go, and move on to the next thing,’ he says. In part, this is who he is. ‘Sometimes I would be referred to as a perfectionist, but I never consider myself a perfectionist, because I’m not,’ he offers. And then, with a whisper of irony that makes his eyes light up again, he insists — ‘a perfectionist is like a dog, chasing its tail.’

The Hublot Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons costs £19,700 (all colours); the Hublot MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons costs. £383,000. Visit the Hublot website for more information.

How best to record the passage of time is a problem which has exercised the mind of man from the beginnings of history. The mechanical clock dates probably from the end of the 13th century, and since that date clock-making has evoked the finest and most precise — and often the most complicated — mechanism of which each succeeding age was capable. Not content with that, the clockmaker called in every appropriate form of applied art to decorate his efforts — the goldsmith, silversmith, enameller, lapidary and others.

The study of horology is, therefore, one which covers a great many forms of mechanical and artistic effort.

No one even remotely connected with horology would ever think of referring to 'the Ilbert Collection of Clocks and Watches.' All over the world the Ilbert Collection, without qualification, is known as the most complete collection of clocks and watches there ever has been, or is ever likely to exist.

The making of it called for the leisure, means, mechanical knowledge and artistic taste that are rarely found in one man. Courtenay Ilbert had them all, and he devoted 50 years to his tremendous achievement. Primarily, the emphasis of the collection is mechanical and scientific, but nearly every form of decorative art is also represented, and there is hardly any — certainly no important — aspect of horology from about 1500 to 1850 which is not worthily represented.

Ilbert died in February, 1956. The British Museum quickly realised the importance of acquiring his collection for the nation, and for two years his executors continued to hold it while the Museum has investigated the possibilities of raising the relatively modest sum of £85,000 for which it was offered to them. Unfortunately, at this time, their budget up to the end of this year had been fully bespoken, and although various substantial offers have been made towards raising the sum, the Treasury has so far refused a special grant for the balance.

Accordingly, despite their desire for the collection to remain intact and in this country, the executors and beneficiaries under Ilbert's will can no longer delay, and short of a miracle or a change of heart by the Treasury, the clocks will be auctioned at Christie's in November. This unique and never-to-be-repeated work of a lifetime will thus be broken up, and probably many treasures of national importance will go out of this country.

The oldest surviving clocks date from the late 14th century; they are monumental mechanisms such as the Salisbury Cathedral clock of 1386. Exceedingly few domestic clocks exist from before 1500 and the Ilbert Collection starts at about the beginning of the 16th century with the typical late Gothic house clocks, with iron movements, and up to three trains, for the main timekeeper and for striking hours and quarters. These are surmounted by one or two bells carried in a framework with crocketed decorations. The trains are weight-driven, and the escapement is the verge and foliot which was universal for clocks until the application of the pendulum in 1657, and for watches until the practicable development of the balance spring in 1675.

Until these two dates, accuracy of timekeeping made little progress and, perhaps as a compensation, this is the great age of decoration in clocks and watches. Watches, or at any rate portable, spring-driven time-keepers, date from the end of the 15th century. The oldest spring-driven clock is dated 1525 and belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The earliest surviving watches, which could be carried about the person, date from 1550, and the Ilbert Collection has a small, drum-shaped instrument from the mid-century, almost completely without ornamentation, which was certainly intended to be carried. Towards the end of the century watches became less uncommon and the collection is well represented with French fusee and German stackfreed specimens in typical pierced and engraved, metal-gilt cases of flattened drum shape. Clocks became more adventurous, such as the lovely little drum clock with rock-crystal sides and a superimposed, dome-shaped alarum.

An alternative to the fusee or stackfreed, as a means of equalising the variable torque of the mainspring, is found in a mechanism by Hans Kiening. The almost drab, box-shaped case contains a movement of superlative finish in which the depth of engagement of the verge with the crown-wheel is reduced as the pull of the mainspring diminishes. Part of the pierced and engraved blued-steel fretwork which decorates the movement plates was missing, and a replacement was made by Ilbert himself. It is indistinguishable from the finest contemporary work.

Of unparalleled importance is the great clock of 1598 by Nicholas Vallin; it is the earliest dated clock of British make, and probably the oldest surviving musical clock. At each quarter a long performance is made of 13 bells, and the outer case is of architectural form, in metal gilt.

The first half of the 17th century saw increasing richness of decoration, and the collection has a superb variety of watches cased in painted enamel, cut rock crystal, engraved silver and silver-gilt, form watches, pin-work, and so forth; and examples of the early Baroque table clocks with complicated astronomical movements and gilt cases in 'tabernacle' shape.

The collection may have had rivals, but it is with the invention of the pendulum for clocks and the balance-spring for watches that it really comes into its own. Reasonably accurate time-keeping became possible after some 350 years of little or no progress; and British masters leapt at the new opportunities, so that within two decades they had established themselves as pre-eminent, and an export trade had been established.

The Dutchman Huygens first brought the pendulum to a stage when it could be produced commercially, and he confided his method to Samuel Coster, who made the first examples. The Dutch family of Fromanteel had previously settled in London, and they sent John Fromanteel to Holland to learn the new system from Coster.

By 1658, they were advertising pendulum clocks in England, and cased them in what was to become the standard British long-case or grandfather clock. Ilbert's specimen, from details of the pediment-topped case, can be identified as probably the oldest surviving British long-case clock. From it stems a selected range of long-case clocks. Next is an early example of the long pendulum and anchor escapement (Britain's first great contribution to horology) in the form of a superbly proportioned, very simple clock by Joseph Knibb. Then come three Tompions; a year clock by Quare; and then one of the first regulator clocks by Graham. George Graham, by his invention of the deadbeat escapement and mercury-compensated pendulum, brought timekeeping from limits of a minute or two a week at best, to a few seconds a month by soon after 1725. Ilbert's Graham regulator is a superb example, giving sidereal and mean time. It is matched by the slightly later sidereal and mean time regulator of Thomas Mudge, with a gridiron pendulum. This perfectly-proportioned piece was about Ilbert's last important addition to the collection.

Then came John Harrison's first practicable marine timekeeper and Mudge's invention of the lever-escapement. Of Harrison's two successful marine timekeepers one is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and one, belonging to the clockmakers' Company, is in the Guildhall Museum. No example is in private ownership; but of the next steps in the development of the marine chronometer the Ilbert Collection is unsurpassed. Mudge's constant force escapement was too complicated for quantity production, but its performance was unsurpassed for a century. Of the three earlier timekeepers made by Mudge, Ilbert has one. Mudge is also not known to have made more than three instruments with the lever escapement, of which the only watch belongs to Her Majesty the Queen. Of the two clocks, Ilbert's is certainly the first. By 1780 John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw were producing relatively cheap marine chronometers on lines which have not been seriously departed from or improved upon. It is questionable if any very early Earnshaw survives, but the Ilbert Collection has every important type of Arnold's work, and typical specimens of Earnshaw's.

Correspondingly came improvements in the accuracy of pocket watches, with the development of Mudge's lever escapement by Emery, Leroux, Grant and Breguet, and the detent escapement by Arnold and Earnshaw. All of these are represented in fascinating profusion, with cases of appropriately simple perfection. The last great step in the perfection of the pocket watch, by the virtual elimination of position errors, was Breguet's tourbillon. His first perfected specimen he gave in a simple, silver drum-case, with an inscription dedicating it to John Arnold. This unique piece and many other Breguet examples are in the collection.

Also of this final period of the artist-craftsman, before Swiss mass-production methods took the field, are some superb late decorative watches such as transparent enamel over engine-turning, complicated astronomical movements and a variety of unusual French clocks, including a bracket year clock by Berthoud.

As a background to all these mechanically and decoratively perfect clocks and watches is a huge chest of some 2,000 watch movements representing every imaginable facet of mechanism from earliest to latest.

There are many fine collections in the world of clocks and watches, but none covers the whole field so comprehensively as Ilbert's vast collection. With the fierce competition among collectors to-day such a thing could never be got together again. For the three and a half centuries covered by the collection, horology has commanded man's greatest mechanical and decorative skill. That the nation, on the responsibility of the Treasury, should throw away the chance of securing the finest horological collection there will ever be, for the want of part only of the agreed valuation of £85,000, seems almost unthinkable.

The Country Life Archive contains more than a century of British architecture, rural life, photography, and property records dating back to the magazine's launch in 1897.

You can search and explore historical content using the Country Life Archive tag on our site, or access the complete backfile (1897–2005) via the ProQuest Country Life Archive.

The English-American actor Cary Grant was a Hollywood star with a generous streak: not only did he give his own gold watch to the woman who cared for his mother in her old age, but he also covered her nursing home fees. The family of this woman, Maggie Leach, have now sold the storied timepiece.

The watch went under the hammer on September 10, at Clevedon Salerooms, as part of the auction house’s Autumn Specialist Sale of Antiques and Collectables. It was sold for £6,800, more than three times its upper estimate of £2,000, after competitive bidding between two telephone bidders and two online, including one from the United States.

Born in Bristol, Grant rose to fame in classics such as North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief.

‘It’s not often a piece comes to us with a story quite this personal,’ says Henry Michallat, an auctioneer at Clevedon Salerooms. ‘This watch is a lovely reminder that even one of Hollywood's biggest names never forgot where, and who, they came from.’

The watch in question is an 18-carat gold, Bueche Girod ladies bracelet-style treasure, likely made in the 1970s. It has Roman numerals on its face and a lapis lazuli crown.

Charity seems to be the flavour of the month. On September 28, four unique, gem-set Rolex Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona watches are heading to auction to raise money for the brand’s Perpetual Planet Initiative.

The watches come in four colourways, each one inspired by a different season, and the proceeds will go towards the Federer Foundations and Re:Wild.

The former was founded by Roger Federer and champions early learning for children in southern Africa and Switzerland; the latter, founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, protects and restores wild eco-systems. The tennis player and the actor are longtime Rolex testimonies.

If the ‘Fab Four’ aren't your speed, the first proper wristwatch of Zinedine Zidane, the French football manager and former player, is coming up for sale in November. His Cartier Pasha will be offered in Christie’s Rare Watches auction and proceeds will benefit ELA International — of which he has been a patron for more than 25 years.

The charity is a non-profit organisation that coordinates research and funding to fight leukodystrophies (rare genetic diseases of the central nervous system). Zidane’s watch features a stainless steel bracelet and sapphire cabochon-set pushers.

‘This Cartier Pasha was the first watch I bought for myself with my first salary when I was playing in Bordeaux,’ says Zidane. ‘I purchased it nearly 35 years ago and it has remained with me ever since… I hope it will also hold special meaning for the person who acquires it.’

Colours come in and out of fashion, but black is forever. While the rest of the watch world spent the last two years dabbling in sorbet — Rolex's Oyster Perpetual in matte pastels, TAG Heuer's Formula 1 Solargraph in pastel green and lavender-blue — TUDOR was working on something completely different.

Its monochrome Black Bay Ceramic (£6,030) is not only eye-catching, it’s the company’s first model with a fully ceramic bracelet, designed to match the 41-millimetre, matte ceramic case and satin-finish charcoal dial. It has a self-winding mechanical movement, a 70-hour power reserve and is waterproof to 660 feet.

Ceramic, for the uninitiated, is a nightmare to work with — it doesn't bend to a maker’s will the way steel does — so building an entire bracelet from it, clasp included (above), is a notable feat of patience and engineering.

The Black Bay follows in the footsteps of some notable timepiece titans: the CHANEL J12, which is credited with transforming ceramic’s reputation from obscure technical material into something fashionable and luxurious; Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon; Hublot Big Bag Integral Ceramic; and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar in black ceramic, which is one of the more impressive examples of ceramic being used in haute horlogerie.

Short on time? Here are five things you need to know about watchmaking ceramic:

1. On the Mohs scale, ceramic scores a nine — bested only by diamond. On the Vickers hardness scale, ceramic measures around 2,300, compared with just 200 for standard stainless steel. However, ceramic is more brittle than steel, gold and titanium, and can crack or splinter on a hard impact — so it's wonderfully scratch-proof, but not indestructible
2. The ceramic used in modern watchmaking is closer to the ceramic NASA uses to protect satellites and spacecraft from extreme heat than it is to the ceramic in your kitchen crockery. It's produced by superheating materials like silica until molten, then cooling and milling them into shape — a world away from a potter's wheel

3. Rolex doesn't use standard ceramic at all — they've developed a patented alloy called Cerachrom. Others have gone further still: Omega blends ceramic with gold to create Ceragold, while Hublot has Magic Gold — both designed to stop soft gold from scratching by fusing it with something nearly indestructible
4. Despite feeling like a thoroughly modern material, the first ceramic watches actually date back to the mid 20th century. It took until the mid 1980s for the technology and material science to mature enough for ceramic to become genuinely attractive to watchmakers at scale
5. Ceramic is hypoallergenic — good news for anyone with a nickel allergy who can't wear stainless steel. It’s also highly UV-resistant, meaning it won't fade or discolour even after years in direct sunlight, unlike gold or dyed materials

Last week, a friend, who shall remain nameless, took his watch, the brand of which will also remain nameless, to the shop that it came from for some necessary repair work. It is an expensive sailing watch, gifted to him by his wife on the occasion of their wedding, so he wore it while competing in a few sailing competitions. It was, unsurprisingly, a bit salty. The shop staff were baffled, but overjoyed. According to them, my friend was their first customer to use the watch as it was intended to be used and to make the most of its extraordinary roster of features.

Sure, these watches work just as well accessorised with a suit in London’s Square Mile, but you wouldn’t buy a speedy sports car and take it to Tesco. Luxury watches and cars are beautiful feats of impressive engineering and not using them to their full potential is a middle finger to the brains behind them. (The exception here is the proliferation of timepieces designed to operate in space. I’m not suggesting you all retrain as astronauts.)

Enter Seiko’s new offering. The Prospex Mechanical PADI 60th Anniversary Limited Edition ‘King Turtle’ watch, designed for another watery pursuit — diving. Seiko is a Japanese manufacturer of watches, clocks and electronic devices. It was founded in 1881 and is probably most famous for producing the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch in 1969 and Japan's first diver's watch, rated to 150 metres, in 1965. This year, they’re celebrating a decade of collaboration with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI).

PADI is the world's largest recreational scuba-diving membership and training organisation, and operates through thousands of dive centers in more than 180 countries. It has certified more than 30 million divers globally — that’s a lot of available wrist space.

The Turtle design is one of Seiko’s most recognisable dive watch shapes and gets its name from the cushion-shape case, which resembles the animal’s shell. This latest iteration is water resistant to 200 metres which is more than you’ll likely ever need because while advanced recreational divers can sometimes reach 40 metres, only extreme technical divers can push past the 100 metre mark.

The day-date display has a handy magnifier tool and the hands and indices are coated in Seiko’s Lumibrite, a luminous paint that absorbs light quickly and glows briefly in the dark, so that you can tell the time in murkier conditions. Most importantly, the bezel can only rotate anticlockwise so you can track time spent underwater, safe in the knowledge that you cannot knock it clockwise, which would make it appear as though less time has elapsed.

The timepiece comes with a deep blue dial, to symbolise the colour of the ocean, and two straps. The silicone one (above) is designed to fit over a wetsuit.

Limited to 8,000 pieces, the King Turtle is remarkably well priced (from £650), especially considering its blue ceramic bezel, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal case and excellent construction.

Before you buy, however, please ask yourself where and when you’re going to wear such a wonderful thing. Afterall, the greatest luxury is not just owning a watch capable of going 200 metres beneath the surface, but having the good sense to take it there.

Have you heard of the Rolex Yacht-Master II (from £16,950)? Yes, it’s technically impressive and visually bold, but it’s also much less loved than a Submariner or a Daytona. Until — maybe — now. This complicated enigma for sailors and collectors of unusual Rolex watches was launched in 2007, discontinued in 2024 and resurrected earlier this year.

Water resistant to 100 metres, the new and improved Yacht-Master II features a clever synchronisation feature with mechanical memory that’s genuinely useful in competitive sailing. The wearer can set a countdown from one to 10 minutes, start it, stop it, reset it and even synchronise it to the official race signal if the gun sounds a few seconds early or late.

Helpfully, the clunky Ring Command bezel used for setting the countdown has been replaced by an easier-to-use push-button design. The buttons are shaped like boat sail winches.

Widely regarded as one of the most technically ambitious Rolex wristwatches, it is not in fact the most complicated (for context: a complicated watch features mechanical functions beyond telling the time. These extra features are called complications). That prize goes to the Sky-Dweller (from £14,800) which combines a dual time zone display with an ingenious annual calendar. The most complicated watch ever made is the Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Solaria Ultra Grand Complication — a miniature design marvel that packs an astonishing 41 complications into 1,521 components.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Yacht-Master II is substantially larger (case: 44 millimetres) than a Submariner (41 millimetres) or Daytona (40 millimetres). If I was forced to come up with a comparison, I suppose I’d describe it as the horological equivalent of a classic racing yacht: impractical for most people, but magnificent in the right context.

I may be wrong, but I don’t feel lists of greatest Britons are drawn up as often as they once were. Mostly, they’ve been replaced by affections for the animal kingdom. I’m all for Eurasian curlews, but as a substitute for Sir Winston Churchill?

As it is, even when these rankings appear, the name of John Arnold (1736-1799) doesn’t tend to register. This despite the fact the Bodmin-born horologist was one of (and perhaps the most significant of) a group of 18th-century horologists who — quite literally — put Britain on the map.

The most famous was John Harrison, the autodidact whose marine chronometers solved the problem of measuring longitude and in doing so kickstarted a period of extraordinary naval dominance that spawned the British Empire (it probably did wonderful things for hedgehogs and barn owls, too, but we can’t be sure).

Harrison’s clocks and watches are now on display at Greenwich, where the meridian — 0° longitude — was established in 1851, 125 years after his death, ensuring world maps would forever centre on the British Isles.

Harrison was a genius and deserved his recognition (as well as the £23,065 in prize money he received for his discovery, about £4.5 million today), but his clever contraptions were bulky — and expensive. It was Arnold’s to follow in his footsteps and continue his work, which he did by miniaturising Harrison’s mechanisms into pocket watches, making them more accurate, more portable and more affordable.

This mattered. Capt James Cook carried an Arnold chronometer on his explorations of the South Pacific, as did Dr David Livingstone during his missions to Africa, where he zealously campaigned against the slave trade. Both championed Arnold’s inventions.

Arnold’s horological achievements were so advanced that they still inform mechanical watchmaking today. But there was one factor that he and his fellow 18th-century watchmakers really struggled to contain, and that was gravity.

Pocket watches typically sat upright all day, in a single position. This meant gravity was always pulling on a mechanism’s moving parts in one direction, and over time, this disrupted its rate and, consequently, its accuracy.

Arnold would devote the latter years of his life to solving this problem and settled on a device that would house the ticking components of a mechanical watch movement inside a rotating cage. This, he reasoned, would offset the effects of gravity, because over the course of 60 seconds, these parts would spin through 360°.

But Arnold would die in 1799, before he completed his project. Anticipating his death, he left his ideas with his collaborator and great friend, the Swiss watchmaker and supplier of timepieces to Marie Antoinette, Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Breguet was a bona fide genius, too, and on June 26, 1801, he filed a patent for what he called a 'tourbillon'. He had lifted the term from Descartes’ philosophy, in which it described the universe, but it was also French for 'whirlwind', a poetic term for the manic rotations of the new device.

This year, Breguet is celebrating 225 years of an invention still lauded by watch collectors for its beauty and intricacy, even if the migration of watches from pockets to wrists has made its purpose all but redundant.

Suitably, the anniversary watches are gorgeous — albeit priced for collectors. Given the means, I could take either of the Marine Tourbillon Equation Marchante 5887 (£296,300) or the Tradition Tourbillon 7047 (£249,700), but even then, I’d keep half my money and opt for the achingly simple, deliciously symmetrical Classique Tourbillon 7357 in either platinum (£156,100) or a pale-but-warm yellow gold known as 'Breguet gold' (£142,000). They’re the purest expression of the Arnold-Breguet legacy.

These days, most high-end watchmakers have dabbled with the tourbillon. It will never be humdrum, but it’s worth noting that Breguet himself managed just 35 tourbillon watches before his death in 1829.

Somewhere along the line Arnold’s contribution has been all but lost, even while tourbillons appear in watches created by the recherché Swiss-based brand that now carries his name, Arnold & Son. History is swept up in Breguet’s tourbillon story, but — and let the record show it — every bit as much of the glory belongs to one of the greatest ever Britons.

The best watch advertisements in Country Life's 130-year-old archive are a timely reminder that great watchmaking never goes out of fashion.

From Victorian pocket watches to modern feats of engineering, the adverts chart the watch's evolution from practical precision instrument to object of desire — as well as consumer's changing tastes.

However, one thing remains reassuringly the same: there's always time for a beautiful watch.

Mappin & Webb

Founded in Sheffield in 1775 by Jonathan Mappin, Mappin & Webb began as a silversmith before becoming one of Britain's foremost jewellers and makers of silverware.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the company sold its own pocket watches and wristwatches including the robust Campaign watch which was popular with British military officers and the Admiralty.

Today, Mappin & Webb no longer manufactures watches under its own name, instead acting as one of the UK's leading authorised retailers for prestigious Swiss brands.

Garrard

Garrard is the world's-oldest jeweller and has long been associated with exceptional watchmaking — especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries when it retailed elegant pocket watches and wristwatches.

The former Crown Jeweller (1843-2007) stopped manufacturing watches about two decades ago, but second-hand timepieces regularly appear on the market for affordable amounts. Look out for models made with nine-carat gold.

Vacheron Constantin

Vacheron Constantin was founded in Geneva in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron making it the world's oldest watchmaker in continuous operation. The maison's motto, 'Do better if possible, and that is always possible', reflects its relentless pursuit of excellence. It is one of the prestigious Holy Trinity of Swiss watchmaking brands, alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet.

Watches of Switzerland

Watches of Switzerland was founded in London in 1924 as a specialist retailer dedicated to Switzerland's finest timepieces. Since then, it's expanded across the UK and into the USA.

Zenith

Zenith was one of the first watch manufacturers to bring every stage of production under one roof when it was founded in 1865.

Renowned for technical innovation, the brand achieved horological fame in 1969 with the launch of the El Primero, the world's first high-frequency automatic chronograph calibre. Its movements have powered some of the industry's most celebrated watches, including early Rolex Daytonas.

Jaeger-LeCoultre

Jaeger-LeCoultre has created more than 1,400 calibres and holds hundreds of patents. Its most celebrated creation, the Reverso, debuted in 1931 with a swivelling case designed to protect the watch face during polo matches.

Tissot

Throughout its history, Tissot has pioneered innovations including the first mass-produced pocket watch and the first watches made from materials such as plastic, stone and wood.

It is the official timekeeper of numerous international sporting events and synonymous with precision and reliability.

Piaget

Piaget began as a maker of high-precision watch movements before establishing itself as a leading luxury watch and jewellery house.

The brand's defining product was the Piaget Altiplano (1957) which was powered by an ultra-thin mechanical calibre (Calibre 9P). A 2018 iteration — the Altiplano Ultimate Concept — measures just 2 millimetres thick.

Omega

Official timekeeper of the Olympic Games since 1932, Omega also made history when the Speedmaster became the first watch worn on the Moon in 1969.

Along with the Speedmaster Moonwatch, the Seamaster and Constellation models best encapsulate Omega's legacy. The latter — pictured above — was its flagship chronometer.

Patek Philippe

Rolex

Rolex was founded in London in 1905 by Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis before relocating to Geneva in 1919. The company created the first waterproof wristwatch, the Oyster, exactly 100 years ago; subsequent iconic models include the Submariner, Datejust, GMT-Master and Daytona.

In a list of the greatest watches, you will seldom find one that isn't in some way linked to one of the greatest human beings — and, particularly, to a man on whom history has bestowed greatness.

The relationship between these men and their watches is eternally curious. It’s symbiotic, but it’s not always clear which party, if either, benefits most.

The prima facie conclusion is that the watches benefit immeasurably more. Omega’s Speedmaster, for example, would be far less but for NASA’s moonwalking astronauts, just as TAG Heuer’s Monaco might have been a non-starter had Steve McQueen not picked one out as filming began on Le Mans.

That, however, is the simplistic view. Doesn’t the humble timepiece deserve some say in the matter, too? How much more presidential does John F. Kennedy seem for wearing an ultra-thin Omega on his wrist during his inauguration? How much more professional do adventurers, such as this generation’s ne plus ultra mountaineer Nims Purja, appear for wearing military-grade Bremont watches during their madcap expeditions? No, we mustn’t underplay the wristwatch’s hand. The benefits of this symbiosis are often evenly distributed.

Rolex’s part in this is particularly acute, of course. Having accompanied Chuck Yeager through the sound barrier in 1947 and Sir Edmund Hillary to the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, it later felt confident to add this footnote to its advertising campaigns: ‘Men who guide the destinies of the world wear Rolex watches.’

Seven decades later, the claim may not be exclusive, but it doesn’t seem the remotest bit fanciful. The notion that a Rolex gives a man a leg-up in life rings true.

This link between image and commodity, embodied by the great wristwatch designs of the 20th century, was a central tenet of Andy Warhol’s work. He was said to have owned more than 300 high-end watches, but regarded few more highly than his Cartier Tank. ‘I don’t wear a Tank watch to tell the time,’ he once said. ‘Actually, I never even wind it. I wear a Tank because it is the watch to wear!’

Warhol recognised that in wearing the right — if we can call it that — watch, his value as a commodity would rise. The theory of mutual benefit appears to work. Yet, as with any theory, the challenge is in establishing whether there’s a point at which it expires — in this case, to identify where the kudos exchange between a watch and its wearer is entirely one-directional.

Royalty, for example, might be beyond it. What could a quotidian accessory, even one in solid gold and created by the most skilled artisans, possibly add to a king? Well, imagine if The King were to have worn a Sekonda to his second son’s wedding, rather than a hand-finished Parmigiani Toric. Had that been his choice, one could safely assume his credibility among sartorialists would have diminished considerably. Still, there’s no question that perceptions of the elite Fleurier manufacture, established only two decades ago, were greatly enhanced by the association with the man who sits on the British throne.

Music, then? Its leading exponents enjoy god-like status, after all. Although again, rapper Stormzy may be a regular visitor to Audemars Piguet’s first-floor Bond Street hideaway, but by shopping what appears to be the length and breadth of the Royal Oak collection, he has proved that some watch designs hold far greater sway over popular opinion than others.

Sir Winston Churchill is a trickier case, even if one often visited. As I’ve written for Country Life before, our war-time leader was a hopeless timekeeper and relied routinely on his Breguet pocket watch to ensure he kept people waiting. Breguet’s unassuming excellence lends authority to all who wear it, but would Churchill’s story be as easy to romanticise had he taken a lesser brand?

Not to categorise it as such (at all), but it was only on researching this story that I discovered Churchill was gifted an IWC pocket watch on his 70th birthday, in 1944, by a group of ‘admiring Zurich physicians’, as the inscription has it. The golden ‘hunter’ pocket watch (one with a hinged cover) carried the further inscription ‘umbra fugit opera manent’, which literally means ‘the shadow flees, but the work remains’.

Perhaps, as an allied victory began to look inevitable, those physicians were alluding to the burden of responsibility that would await the world’s victorious leaders in the aftermath of the conflict. The original is rumoured still to be in the Churchill family’s possession, but IWC has a replica of it in its Schaffhausen museum in Switzerland.

IWC’s legend may grow with the tale, but then so, somehow, does Churchill’s, the watch lending additional gravitas to the moment.

Sticking with the conclusion of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt wore a Tiffany & Co gold dress watch during the Yalta Conference of February 1945, a piece that serves as a reminder that not all great associations lead to great creative longevity.

The aesthetic of the watch that kept time as F. D. R. met with Churchill and Joseph Stalin to determine how Germany and Europe would be reorganised after the war is completely timeless, yet Tiffany’s recent return to the form has done little to revive its fortunes as a watchmaker.

Further back in time, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s flip-case Reverso was little more than an outlandish concept when Edward VIII abdicated. Because of his decision, the Reverso engraved for his inauguration never reached its intended owner, instead ending up in the Le Sentier company’s archives. Despite the painful ignominy of his path, the upward trajectory of the Reverso continued. Today, it’s seen as a staple of a watch wardrobe of any merit.

There is, of course, a glaring omission in the brands and watches subjected to the theory to this point. Unlike Rolex or even more stoic dial names such as Blancpain (which famously equipped Jacques Cousteau with watches for his early diving expeditions, an association it still trades on today), Patek Philippe has never ventured to create links between its watches and men of any particular distinction. That is not to say they don’t exist, merely that Patek has never been overt in its courtship of greatness. Many of its best watches were commissioned, perhaps a sign that, in some cases, the watch has greater power to augment its owner’s status than the other way round.

Plutocrats of the early 20th century, most famously Henry Graves Jnr and James Ward Packard, entered into a slightly unseemly battle of one-upmanship, commissioning watches with ever greater numbers of complications from Patek. In doing so, they prompted some of the most valuable watches ever made (and the most complicated imagined before the dawn of CAD technology).

In 2014, the Henry Graves Jnr Supercomplication was sold by Sotheby’s for a then-record sum of $24 million (£18.9 million). Were it not for such watches, it’s highly unlikely that these men would still enjoy the oxygen of column inches they do today.

It’s settled, then? Not quite. Because there is one watch that owes almost if not all its greatness entirely to one man. If not for Paul Newman’s love of the Rolex Daytona with an ‘exotic’ dial, the model would almost certainly have disappeared into the archives.

Introduced in the 1960s, the dial configuration that now distinguishes a Rolex ‘Paul Newman’ Daytona was a commercial flop — but thanks to the association, vintage examples routinely sell for six-figure sums and up.

His own watch, given to him by his wife and inscribed with the words ‘Drive Slowly, Joanne’, went under the hammer in 2017 for $17.8 million (£14 million). Newman’s greatness singularly elevated the watch to its current grail status.

There’s an exception to every rule — but, otherwise, great watches and great men co-exist in a sort of mutual-appreciation society. And what a society it is.

The surge in gold prices is prompting the melting down of vintage and luxury watches as the value of the component metal exceeds that of the timepiece.

At the time of writing (July 1), the value of gold per troy ounce is about £3,153, up from £1,842 in June 2024.

‘The increase in scrapping this year has been substantial,’ says Jon White, founder of Gold Traders in Wiltshire and manager of a local auction house, ‘particularly for mid-tier luxury watches not yet considered collectors’ items.’

Jon explains that a number of additional factors is driving people to the scrap heap over the salesroom: some strap designs are difficult and costly to adjust; the time it takes to value and sell on the second-hand market; the fact that dealers typic-ally offer about 30% below market value; and how readily available the model is.

Scrapping can prove more practical and may now yield a better sum. Meanwhile, for dealers, costs of servicing, operating and warranties required for resale make melting down more commercially viable.

Although top-tier investments (Patek Philippe is a sure bet) remain largely insulated, what could emerge is a tussle between the value of craftsmanship, sentimentality and fiscal expediency. ‘On the flipside,’ Jon says, ‘as the supply of particular models on the market reduces over time, one can assume the collectible value will increase. Still, it is awful to dismantle something of significance.’

It is always a pity to sully the pleasures of collecting watches with the taint of filthy lucre, but the soaring value of a certain model of wristwatch can function as a helpful barometer of shifting tastes.

Five years ago, one result in particular sent the mercury shooting up the scale to command the attention of the market. Trophy models by Patek Philippe and Rolex frequently fetch six- and seven-figure sums, but, on November 10, 2021, after fierce bidding, a Cartier Crash watch from 1970 quadrupled its low estimate of 200,000 Swiss francs to sell for 806,500 Swiss francs.

It was an astonishing result, made all the more remarkable because included in the sale was an insurance valuation for the watch from 1997 that valued the watch at £40,000.

The Cartier Crash was invented in the London branch of the famous jeweller in the late 1960s. Until they were reunited in the 1970s, Cartier’s three main boutiques, in Paris, London, and New York, were separately owned by different members of the family and were known for producing their own distinct styles of products.

For instance, for much of the first half of the 20th century, the London branch conducted a brisk, sometimes roaring trade in tiaras, because they were still required for Court occasions, coming-out balls and so on.

But, by the 1960s, London Society had changed: King’s Road fashions rather than Queen Charlotte’s ball dictated tastes and Cartier reflected this shift in the centre of social gravity, offering groovy designs with strange shaped cases and bold dials with large Roman numerals.

Of these far-out creations, none was further out than the Crash. The name referred to the watch’s creation myth that a timepiece damaged by a car crash had been brought in for repair. Everything about the watch was, to use a technical term, wonky: the case asymmetrical, the buckle twisted off centre, even the concealed lugs, invisible when the watch was on the wrist, were at crazy angles. It was so strange that even Cartier was unsure about issuing it, as I was told some years ago by Dennis Gardiner, a veteran designer of Cartier London, who started work in 1947.

‘Mr Emmerson [Mr Gardiner’s colleague and co-designer] was a great designer and I think there was a little bit of the Salvador Dalí in the Crash. Mr Cartier would not make it at first. He said it was too much like Carnaby Street of those days, but the first one sold immediately and they became a cherished item.’

Even so, they were too avant-garde for many traditional Cartier customers. Stewart Granger bought one, but returned after a week to exchange it for something more conventional. Such was their complexity of manufacture that only about a dozen were made in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a couple more on very special order during the 1990s.

London Crashes are true grail watches, but even more common, later examples made in larger numbers by Cartier Paris are increasingly sought after. In the 21st century, the design has been revisited and reinterpreted, including this year, with the release of the Cartier Privé Crash Skeleton in platinum. The collector's item first received a skeletonised dial treatment in 2015, nearly 50 years after the watch's debut, but the 2026 itineration marks the introduction of a new movement, designed to fit and follow the warped case.

However, although it may be the most spectacular of shaped case watches, the Crash is far from being the sole non-round wristwatch to find popularity in recent years. Nor is the shaped case a new thing: indeed, it is as old as the wristwatch.

In 1810, the Queen of Naples commissioned a watch from Breguet that is believed by some to be the first wristwatch. Known as No 2639, it took 2½ years to make. Emmanuel Breguet, the current historian of the Breguet brand, describes it as 'of revolutionary construction and unprecedented sophistication, consisting of a repeating watch with additional refinements, oblong and exceptionally slender with a wristlet made of hair intertwined with gold thread’.

Although this watch is commemorated by the Breguet brand today with a distinctive, egg-like oval watch for women, it would be another century before the wristwatch began to be taken seriously.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the practicality of the wristwatch for active men began to be appreciated: during the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, British soldiers wore pocket watches in cup-like wristbands. Yet even during the early decades of the 20th century the jury was still out as to whether watches should be worn in the waistcoat pocket or on the wrist and many wristlet watches, as they were called, continued to be made from converted pocket watches or ladies pendant watches.

It was in order to stress their modernity that designers of purpose-built, rather than converted, wristwatches chose non-round designs. In this, Louis Cartier was a leader, making the small, square Santos wristwatch for the eponymous Brazilian-born aviator, who was a frequent sight in the skies above Belle Epoque Paris, scooting about in his powered airships.

The Santos set a precedent and, emboldened by its success, even more esoteric models were launched including Tonneau, which found favour with the ultra-modern composer Stravinsky; the tortoise-shaped Tortue; the bell-shaped Cloche; and, of course, the Tank with its numerous derivatives. These watches are spectacular to look at and, after many years in the shadows, Cartier has once again reissued many of its quirkier watches to be worn by both women and — since the trend for oversize watches has receded — men.

Cartier was not alone in adopting non-round shapes to differentiate its early wristwatch production. At roughly the same time, Patek Philippe was supplying the Brazilian jeweller Gondolo with tonneau and rectangular watches shaped to follow the curve of the wrist — so significant were these watches that, even to this day at Patek, a non-round watch is called a Gondolo.

At Vacheron Constantin, between 1919 and 1921, a cushion-cased wristwatch was created for the American market. It was made truly different by the presence of the winding crown at the top right-hand corner of the case, roughly where one would expect to see half-past one. In 2021, the watch was revived, to appeal to 21st-century tastes.

This year is the 95th anniversary of one of the most famous of non-round watches, the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso, a watch that, as its name suggests, can be turned over on the wrist. This innovation was conceived to protect the watch glass, the most fragile part of the watch at the time. Although synthetic-crystal watch glass has long ago obviated the need for such a protective measure, the flip-over functionality has remained as an opportunity for including either a second face for the watch, with additional functions, or as a canvas for the artists at Jaeger to use to embellish its appearance.

Whether engraved with a coat of arms or decorated with enamel painting (some art-collector clients have even had their paintings reproduced in miniature), the effect can be eye-catching.

Today, the visual effect of the shaped case wristwatch is winning new converts. When Rihanna was photographed announcing her first pregnancy, she wore a pink anorak and ripped jeans, festooned with jewellery. Distended abdomen aside, it was her wrist that attracted attention. She was wearing one of the rarest of Rolexes, the King Midas.

First appearing in the early 1960s, the King Midas used solid gold throughout. ‘Never before — a watch so daringly new, so outrageously different, so harmoniously classical. Named after the legendary king with the golden touch, sculptured from a block of solid 18-carat gold, the King Midas is a watch designed for the most discriminating people in the world’ enthused an early advertisement.

Straight on one side, angled to a point on the other, when laid flat on its edge it evokes the pediment and tympanum of a classical building. ‘We created this as a modern tribute to ancient Greece’ explained one tagline.

Even the box was truly remarkable, taking as its inspiration a masterpiece in the British Museum, the famed Midas stamnos, a lidded pottery vessel combining aspects of vase and amphora that was created in about 440 BC. The black ground is decorated with red figures depicting Silenos led before Midas.

I never saw Rihanna as a student of classical antiquity, but it seems that the strangely shaped Rolex King Midas has finally brought out her inner Mary Beard.

I live under a number of illusions, but I’ve never thought I’d make a great watchmaker. For starters, my hands are enormous (not a humblebrag, but I can see why some might think otherwise), and I have no patience for minutiae. Honestly, all those tiny components. So fiddly. I have great admiration for watchmakers, but by the end of week one I’d be flush with rage. Or bored.

This is why I almost always resist invitations to have a go at watchmaking. But then when Richard Benc, the elven founder of British watch brand Studio Underd0g, messaged me to say he was opening a new facility just outside London with a space set aside for punters to have a go at watch assembly, and would I like to give it a try, I said yes. Why? Partly home soil, but mostly because Richard is British watchmaking’s Willy Wonka. He even looks a bit like Gene Wilder.

Benc — rhymes with sense — founded his brand during lockdown and has made a name for it with Instagram-friendly watch drops, few more fêted than those with watermelon or pizza-themed dials. It seems to have gone well. In not much more than five years, Richard has sold more than 30,000 watches. He now drives a Porsche.

For his next trick, he’s taken a ‘seven-figure’ plunge and opened up a facility where he can build watches, doubling down on the ‘Assembled in Great Britain’ tag he adds to his watch dials. It’s in Maidenhead and called the The Dogh0use, a name stencilled on the glass over the plum-coloured front door in the gently ironic sans serif typeface Richard uses to express the brand’s kooky spirit (some of his campaign artwork is very Wes Anderson). He reckons he can assemble between 1,200 and 1,500 watches a month here, an uptick of around 25% on last year.

And it’s to The Dogh0use I’ve been invited. Richard’s team have just finished phase one of the fit-out, and the smell of fresh paint lingers. Catherine Godon of the London-based Letter Studio interiors has taken the Wonka-Anderson brief to heart, creating a speakeasy of sorts where customer presentations will take place. The rich plum tree paint shade continues, and there are wicker John Cullen accent lights on the walls and a deep-pile pink and burnt orange Nordic Knot rug on the floor. The centrepiece is a rather charming bespoke two-seater crush velvet armchair that transforms into an upscale platform for a game of Connect4, played using tokens fashioned from Studio Underd0g watch dials. Despite the autumnal tones, the space is warm and welcoming.

Along the corridor, our little group of four is shown into a small workshop where we’ll assemble the 01Series Guava, a limited-edition 39.5mm version of Studio Underd0g’s signature chronograph with a pink and lime green dial that will only be available at The Dogh0use. It costs £575, but for the more dexterous with an extra £125 to spend, you can go behind the curtain and build it yourself.

Now, someone good at watch assembly will assemble 20 pieces in a day, roughly one every 25 minutes. But Richard’s head of assembly training, former Rolex employee Joshua Sable, has set aside four hours for our quartet to do just one.

At the bench — as watchmaker’s desks are called — we’re presented with a tray of components and lots of Lilliputian tools. Some are obviously screwdrivers or tweezers; others look completely alien. The mechanical movement that will sit at the heart of the watch arrives from China in one piece, and so thank goodness, we won’t be playing with tiny wheels, pinions and hairsprings. The job in hand is to attach the movement to the dial, add the five hands and the crown and its winding stem, and then case it up.

It sounds simple enough. But it’s not. The screw heads are tiny and only visible through a loupe. Some of the hands are barely thicker than an ant’s leg, and slotting them on top of an even smaller pivot is immensely difficult. More than once, my hay-baler hands gripped the tweezers too hard and sent a screw or a hand flying I don’t know where: they’re so small that once they’re gone, there’s no finding them. It’s embarrassing, but also somehow quite funny. Joshua was clearly expecting the maladroitness of his charges, and has pots of spare components ready to gloss over our mistakes.

Four hours later, though, an enormous feeling of satisfaction. In front of me is a working mechanical wristwatch. Even that skinny chronograph central seconds hand is beautifully aligned with the zero marker. A labour of love, that one. Joshua seems pleased. He tests it for accuracy and water-resistance, and signs it off. I made a watch. With these hands. Sort of. Just don’t ask me to do it again.

To book an appointment or an assembly experience at The Dogh0use, visit the Studio's website.

The recent collaboration between watchmakers Audemars Piguet (AP) and Swatch was always going to cause a stir, although the levels to which people went to get their hands on one was still surprising. (Swatch had to close stores in cities across the UK, after huge queues formed outside them, 'in light of safety considerations for both our customers and our staff'.)

And what were they after? A Royal Pop pocket watch, priced from £335. The cleverly-designed and colourful, eight-piece collection, inspired by the legendary AP Royal Oak, taps into a burgeoning market. In recent years, heritage and contemporary brands have rushed to release pocket watches — perhaps inspired by Peaky Blinders? — that range from the affordable to one-off masterpieces.

Some watchmakers utilise the style to mark significant anniversaries, honouring their history with a timepiece that was integral to it. For others it is a tool with which to showcase their design prowess and technical expertise, a recent example being the Hermès Pocket Roaaaaar! which features a lion’s head crafted from wood marquetry (about £160,000). It is one of several pocket models that Hermès has introduced since 2012.

Many have collectors in mind, but signs of demand are clear at the accessible end of the market. When British watchmakers Christopher Ward and Studio Underd0g collaborated on a pocket watch last year, the 100-piece collection sold out in 15 minutes (£2,995), and The Camden Watch Company cites years of customer requests behind its new launch (£170).

Historical appeal and modern sensibilities underpin the pocket watch's revival. A myriad designs are transformable and can be taken from pocket to pendant via a chain (The Camden Watch Company includes one for free when you pre-order). Some come with a stand so that you can use it as a sort of desk or bedside table clock at home. AP and Swatch's Royal Pop has a calfskin lanyard so that you can wear it around your neck or wrist, or as a bag charm.

Where convenience is concerned, reaching for a pocket watch is no more strenuous than reaching for a mobile phone — but it's far more dignified.

The world of watches has a complicated relationship with modesty. In Geneva, the watch world’s spiritual home, the biggest brands pride themselves on their rooftop-mounted neon signs that cast illuminations across the lake. At its biggest annual gathering, an exposition called Watches & Wonders held in the same city, from which I have just returned, they create four-storey monuments to their craft and compete over the most extravagant decorations.

If one suspends two racing cars in mid-air on their stand, another will import a real-life stunt plane to decorate theirs; a four-metre-tall diving tank faces off against an immersive space station makeover for your attention. And yet watchmaking remains a fundamentally quiet discipline with most workshops and factories tucked away in the Swiss hills. When you visit one, the white-coated watchmakers are so quiet you could hear the proverbial pin drop (which would also trigger an inquiry; those parts aren’t cheap).

It’s the same story with the watches themselves. Some are all outright extravagance, but most traditional brands try to walk a line between the age-old values of discretion and taste, and the sense that in this socially-saturated era, customers expect to see wares flaunted with the restraint of a Kardashian-led campaign.

All of this makes it relatively rare to find a watch that doesn’t feel the need to shout. But we haven’t given up. In fact, we have put together a selection of the latest releases that represent outstanding design and engineering, but won’t make people think you’re wearing it as a substitute for a personality (or attract unwanted attention of the very worst kind — on which point we can only add that anything valuable should be worn with care).

First up is Vacheron Constantin who is looking remarkably fresh-faced, despite the fact that it celebrated its 270th year in business last year — with so many superlative creations the brand had to hire out the Louvre.

They’ve given us a much more subtle star for 2026 — in the form of a new Overseas Ultra-Thin. It’s not a total shrinking violet, courtesy of its finely-faceted bracelet, but it enjoys the camouflage of platinum which could be mistaken for stainless steel from a distance, but on the wrist, feels emphatically anything but.

The 39.5 millimetre watch is only 7.35 millimetres thick, and therein lies the appeal for devotees of the brand. Vacheron Constantin discontinued its previous Ultra-Thin some years ago, and has brought the model back with a new in-house movement, the Calibre 2550. From one of the most prestigious watchmakers in the world, that goes a long way towards justifying the £103,000 price tag.

Platinum is also the trick of choice at Cartier, whose off-catalogue Tank Louis Cartier is to all intents and purposes as low-key and ubiquitous as you’d expect from the 129-year old design masterpiece.

The tell-tale signs are there for faithful fans of the brand, but the blue sapphire cabochon in the watch’s crown has been replaced with a red ruby — which indicates that it’s been made out of platinum. Lately, Cartier has taken to offering these rare models with a burgundy leather strap to match.

In general, opting for a slim dress watch on a leather strap is a sure-fire way to fly under the radar — a style rule that Patek Philippe has also embraced. The brand doesn’t have a single celebrity ambassador or sports partnership to its name, though you’d never describe it as entirely discreet. Its Nautilus range, which celebrated 50 years this year with a pair of limited editions and an eight-day desk clock (all in white gold or platinum, naturally), is the status symbol par excellence.

Among its important 2026 launches is an enormous 47 millimetre Celestial Sunrise and Sunset grand complication dedicated to tracking numerous astronomical functions (none so astronomical as the price, however, which is an equally arresting £353,210) and the Golden Ellipse, a delicate, Modernist creation originally introduced in 1968 and barely touched since. The very gently updated iteration is smaller, suitably restrained, but not quite as dainty. Inside, an automatic ultra-thin movement beats happily along, but you wouldn’t know it. The Ellipse has a solid back, perhaps the ultimate statement of watchmaking discretion these days.

The most emphatic watch on our list is the one that industry insiders almost universally agreed emerged as Watches & Wonders’ star of the show. Parmigiani Fleurier, which likely won’t be on the casual collector’s radar, has built a reputation for mechanical quality since it first started watchmaking 30 years ago. Among watch-spotters (yes, they exist), Parmigiani is also best-known for being the brand most often sported by The King. In recent years, it has undergone something of a design revolution under the current CEO, Guido Terreni.

The new Chronograph Mysterieux is as clever as it is understated: unlike most chronographs, which pack the watch dial with more information than the fine print of your mobile phone contract, it has a single button and no numbered scales whatsoever. Instead, at the press of the button, the main hands snap to 12 o’clock and start measuring the time, while a previously concealed hour and minute hand carry on keeping the time of day.

It’s frighteningly complicated underneath, and makes for quite a good party trick — if your own sense of modesty deserts you. Like the Vacheron Constantin and Cartier, it is cased in platinum (and stainless steel), and costs CHF36,900 (about £34,997).

Also doing much more than it appears — like your smartest friend, who never appears to be paying much attention before delivering the most appropriate and incisive remark — is the H. Moser & Cie Endeavour Perpetual Calendar. A mainstay of the company’s range, it is released this year in tantalum, a heavy metal that’s not quite precious, but prized by watch geeks for its blue-grey sheen and the fact that it’s so hard to machine, only the most contrarian manufacturers can be bothered.

The rest of the watch has had a monotone grey makeover, which is a lot more alluring than it sounds thanks to the delicate mix of textured finishes. Its genius lies in the fact that unlike every other perpetual calendar on the market, it feels no need to display data like the day of the week, phase of the moon or leap year on its dial. Instead, there is just a date window, and a very small arrowhead hand at the centre beneath the hours and minutes. This uses the 12 regular points of the watch dial to indicate the month, rather than the hours — although H. Moser, in its constant quest for minimalism, has done away with the markers as well.

In fact, it hasn’t stopped there: there isn’t even a maker’s logo anywhere to be seen. Now that’s modest.

55 cars. 110 drivers. Two arch rivals. One iconic film. Keeping pace with it all, a Heuer Monaco watch like no other, on the wrist of the coolest actor to grace Hollywood. In the 1971 film Le Mans, Steve McQueen sports a piece of wrist candy that is just as cool as his on-screen race car driver, Michael Delaney. On June 15, at Sotheby's in New York, the watch will make its auction debut as part of their Important Watches sale.

The watch comes with more than 200 archival photographs, as well as correspondence between the film set and Heuer. It is estimated to sell for $500,000 – $1 million (about £370,000 – £740,000).

The piece of film history comes from the personal archive of Don Nunley, the property master of Le Mans. There were seven Heuer Monaco watches supplied while filming, but this one was kept by Don afterwards for himself. Another watch from the film is at the TAG Heuer Museum (the brand was renamed when Techniques d'Avant Garde — TAG — purchased a majority stake in the company in 1985). A further watch, thought to have been used in pre-production for the film, sold at Sotheby's New York in 2024 for $1.4 million.

The Heuer Monaco was the first square water-resistant automatic chronograph, and was introduced in 1969. Don says this particular watch was ‘worn by Steve McQueen most often throughout the film and on set’.

For more information, visit the Sotheby's website

The most memorable jewellery watches unveiled at Watches & Wonders 2026 were the coming together of two heritage skills: haute horlogerie and jewellery-making. The hallmarks included rarely seen raw materials — in the case of Piaget: a hardstone nicknamed Storm Stone because of its swirling, stormy sky like pattern — diamonds and new shapes that celebrate both design and artisanal prowess.

What? Ludo Secret watch

Who? Van Cleef & Arpels

At its ateliers and design studios on Paris’ Place Vendôme, Van Cleef & Arpels dreams up timepieces that capture ‘the poetry of time’. What does this mean, you ask? Creative themes that span topics from love and midnight rendezvous to florals and the night sky, and animated dials. Then, there are the maison’s contemporary takes on its archival models. Among them is a new Ludo Secret watch — a high jewellery marvel in yellow gold and dusky sky-blue sapphires, set in a rounded moon shape. The heritage model was first unveiled in 1949; it is also a timepiece take on the 1934 Ludo bracelet. Its design interpretation is quintessentially Parisian: the Ludo nods to haute couture ateliers with gold links assembled to form a supple, mesh-like ribbon. A white guilloché mother-of-pearl dial with a baguette-cut sapphire to mark 12 o’clock is revealed when both sides of the buckle are pressed.

What? Myst de Cartier

Who? Cartier

The Myst de Cartier pays tribute to one of the Paris maisons most revered collaborators. ‘The watch is all about volume and movement,’ says Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s director of image, style and heritage. ‘Its design follows in the footsteps of the jewellery watches created under the direction of Jeanne Toussaint in the early 1930s, pieces that were both sculptural and flamboyant.’ Toussaint, a Belgian-born French designer, joined Cartier Paris in 1913. In 1933, she was appointed creative director of high jewellery. It was during Toussaint’s highly successful tenure that Cartier further embraced the panther as a house mascot. Sculpturally striking jewellery was another of Toussaint’s fortes. And so this year’s Myst de Cartier watch doubles as a bracelet with winding, alternating curves, expressed in yellow gold, white diamonds and black lacquer. Each iteration requires 112 hours of gem-setting — a task that is carried out in the Cartier Maison des Métiers d'Art in Switzerland. Ingeniously, the watch’s strap does not require a clasp, as all components have been strung on a piece of elastic.

What? Baignoire Clou de Paris

Who? Cartier

Also from Cartier comes a new version of the Baignoire watch. This is a model that was first devised in 1912 by Louis Cartier, and then revisited in 1958. Romy Schneider sported a Cartier Baignoire, as has Catherine Deneuve and, more recently, Lana del Rey. Diana, Princess of Wales also owned a version of the oval case watch. Gently updated versions include monochrome yellow gold models detailed with the Clou de Paris, a motif that Cartier first embraced in the 1920s and which is made up of many pyramid-shaped hobnail studs.

What? Noeud de Camélia Embroidered Cuff

Who? Chanel

At this year’s Watches and Wonders, Chanel and its Watchmaking Creation Studio led by Arnaud Chastaingt presented new takes on its totemic J12 wristwatch. Elsewhere, there were monochrome timepieces that embraced a joyful gaming theme, from chess-inspired creations, to pixelated portrait dials (of Coco Chanel).

The Noeud de Camélia line of watches sits somewhere between haute horologerie, high jewellery and haute couture. A quintet of precious watches inspired by Coco Chanel's favourite bloom, Noeud de Camélia follows the shape of a bow which in itself is a house insignia. The Cuff version is limited to just 20 pieces and features a white gold case and a grosgrain-effect, black leather bracelet, artfully finessed in the workshop of Maison d’art Lesage, a legendary haute couture embroidery atelier.

Sixty baguette-cut diamonds and one central, brilliant-cut diamond adorn the camellia flower — which keeps a lacquer dial hidden from view.

What? Swinging Pebbles Pietersite

Who? Piaget

Piaget has long worked with ornamental hard stones, and to great effect. This year, the Swiss brand presented several timepieces studded with vibrant gems, such as blue quartz and reddish-brown bull’s eye (both make up dials of 2026 iterations of the Piaget Warhol watch), and, in the case of an iridescent diamond cuff watch, turquoise.

Piaget’s expertise is best demonstrated by Swinging Pebbles, a line of precious sautoire-style watches. One of these uses pietersite, a rare stone from Namibia.

What? Tubogas Studs Capsule 104301 / 104347

Who? Bvlgari

One is a precious metal; the other, less so. A newly-launched capsule collection by Roman maison Bvlgari has been crafted from gold… and steel. The latter is more readily found in industrial design; at Bvlgari, supple bands of steel now clash with five yellow gold studs and shape the house’s famous Tubogas. The metals frame a white mother-of-pearl dial.

What? Spirit of Big Bang Impact

Who? Hublot

And so for something a little different: the Spirit of Big Bang Impact, by disruptor brand Hublot. The 42mm, tonneau-shaped watch comes in three iterations, including a limited-edition design crafted out of clear white sapphire and white diamonds. Technically, this presents a world first, as the diamonds have been set directly into the sapphire, a daunting task considering that sapphire ranks among the world’s hardest materials.

What? Cape Cod mini

Who? Hermès

How best to describe the famous geometric case of Hermès’s Cape Cod watch? Well, a square within a rectangle is perhaps the easiest, and most apt, answer.

The Cape Cod was first released in 1991, follows the design of Henri d'Origny — his track record includes the brand’s seminal silk scarves and ties — and reinterprets the brand’s signature, maritime Chain d’Ancre motif.

It was in 1998 that Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela, then the house’s creative director of womenswear, added a long strap to the Cape Cod’s industrial design inspired case, creating the much referenced double tour.

This year, new bejewelled versions of the Cape Cod include a lilliputian mini version in yellow gold, set with diamonds and worn with a golden leather strap. Double tour, of course.

‘Christmas time, mistletoe and wine; children singing Christian rhyme’, sings Sir Cliff Richard. All very well, Cliff, but what is the actual time? The children in my house are more likely to be singing K-pop Demon Hunters, but that’s by the by. We need authoritative sources of timekeeping this Christmas, not vague sentiment.

The oven timer that you’re planning on using for the turkey doesn’t count either because I bet you haven’t adjusted it since the clocks went back? There’s only one thing for it — a new watch, and just to be on the safe side, I’ve pulled together recommendations for the whole family, from teenagers to fashionistas.

For him

I suggest gifting the man in your life, be it your husband, father, brother or lonely neighbour upon whom you take pity (and are, presumably, extremely fond of), a solid and capable watch that will serve him well year-round.

First up, there’s Omega’s Seamaster 300M — newly released with bright orange details across the dial and a slightly dressy Milanese mesh strap. It’s a redoubtable tool watch but also prestigious enough to cut it in more professional settings.

For the frequent flyer, I recommend the Nomos Glashutte Club Sport World Timer. It’s available in a variety of colourful limited editions, or in a more straightforward silver or blue. I like the Glacier version. It’s rare to find such a well-made world time watch (one that displays the world’s time zones) at this price.

Lastly, if sporty and adventurous isn’t quite the thing, how about the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Control Calendar? It’s beautifully finished, with a multi-textured dial, but not too fancy for daily use.

For her

A Joni Mitchell CD. Just kidding. Instead, guarantee a genuinely cheerful reaction with one of 2025’s most glamorous new watches — a category in which you are monumentally spoilt for choice.

Top of the list is the Bulgari Serpenti Aeterna, a scaling-back of the wrist-wrapping icon of the late 1940s. It has shed the typically bulbous snake’s head for a clean point and looks more like a bangle because of it. Thankfully, it hasn’t lost any of its viper-sharp personality in the process.

For something more decidedly 21st-century — and a little bit more multi-purpose — try Hermès’s Cut model in azure, a 36mm slice of stainless steel that’s equal parts contemporary, sporty (especially on the pale blue rubber strap) and, with its diamond-set bezel, dressy.

Last, but in no way least, what could be better than peeling back the Christmas wrapping to find one of Cartier’s red boxes? Or watching someone do so. You could opt for the Panthère — earlier this year, Cartier released gem-set varieties — or the real people-pleaser, the Baignore, which comes in a multitude of sizes and styles, on satin and leather straps or a solid gold bracelet. The latter — which was in fact new last year — gets my vote.

For the teenage son

Who can keep up with teenage trends? (Apparently they’re into water bottles, Jellycat cuddly toys and paper notebooks — which makes me think they’re also deeply into trolling older generations).

One watch that’s custom-made for rapidly-changing tastes is the Bamford London Mayfair 2.0 which comes with a swappable bioceramic case and a myriad different straps so that your teenager can mix up their look from one day to the next.

The chronographs from Split watches are equally as playful. They use ceramic-hybrid cases for durability and for each one sold, the company donates an hour’s worth of therapy to mental health charity Anna Freud.

For teens who might respond better to something a bit more traditional, try the Tudor Ranger. It has gap-year-proof build quality and boasts the kind of horological quality that’ll still be respected once they’ve made their final withdrawal from the Bank of Mum and Dad.

For the hardcore horology lover

Picking out the right watch for a super-geek is harder than making it through one of their diatribes about hand-finishing with your faculties intact. Try the A. Lange & Sohne Saxonia Thin (above) — 40 millimetres of unbeatable German handicraft with a black onyx dial that they’re guaranteed to gaze at, slack-jawed (giving you precious seconds to make your escape before they launch into an enthusiastic explanation of the engraved balance cock).

Alternatively, look to Parisian brand Trilobe who recently launched the Trente-Deux, the first watch in its collection to feature its own movement, the Trente-Deux. You’ll get endless brownie points simply for knowing it exists.

If you’re really pushing the boat out, try and get your hands on Vacheron Constantin’s Traditionelle Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin. Its arrival, a few weeks ago, had horolophiles hastily updating their letters to Father Christmas. Underneath the 1990s-style 36mm case, there’s a calendar that won’t need adjusting for the next 400 years. So no excuse to miss an anniversary ever again.

If the budget won’t stretch to a five-figure masterpiece, get them a heavyweight watch book instead — they’ll happily sink into something like The Rolex Legacy by James Dowling for hours on end.

For the fashionista

Fashion and watches are more closely entwined than ever, with collaborations across the divide now commonplace and some very serious watchmaking emerging from the likes of Gucci, Dior and Louis Vuitton. In that respect, it’s hard to look past something like the latter’s Art Deco-inspired Tambour Convergence.

However, perhaps fashion’s greatest influence on watchmaking has been to instill much greater levels of whimsy and stylistic experimentation. It’s given us new brands like Anoma, whose futuristic A1 Optical would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. It’s also the perfect watch for anyone who believes — correctly — that the green triangle is the best Quality Street chocolate.

If you’d rather give someone something a bit more conventional, but something that still informs those around you that you know your Amiri from your Aimé Leon Dore, what about the Noah x Timex Oval Moon Phase? The quartz watch costs a mere £220, but is still in more demand than timepieces fifty times the price.

If the prior paragraph means nothing to you it probably means you’re just not hipster enough for such things — but I bet I can move you with the Ralph Lauren Cowboy Polo Bear watch? (Surely everyone’s heard of Ralph Lauren — especially after the stellar year it’s had?) The watch is cuter than a mini mince pie and there are versions for men and for women.

“As fast and reliable as express trains, and the greatest fun in the world to drive”.

That’s how the famed author, soldier, Arabist, spy and bike nut T. E. Lawrence described his beloved Brough Superiors, the ‘Rolls-Royce of motorcycles’ (in the opinion of contemporary journalist H. D. Teague) that cost as much to buy as a terraced house back in the 1920s.

Fast forward a century, and I’m sitting on a modern-day ‘Brough’ that, at £210,000 plus VAT, actually costs more than many of today's terraced houses and has indeed proved to be ‘the greatest fun in the world to drive’ .

It’s called the RMB01 and, with its aggressive stance, low profile lines and hollowed-out framework, it could easily be a prop from a sci-fi movie. After a dozen ever more rapid laps of Spain’s Calafat race circuit, however, I can confirm that it is indeed a fully working machine.

The 150 mph, track-only beast is the product of a collaboration between the modern-day Brough Superior and ultra high-end watch maker Richard Mille, which is known for producing timepieces that make the motorcycle seem inexpensive — two years ago, an example of its RM 53-02 Sapphire Tourbillon fetched $4.5 million at Sotheby’s.

And it won’t take Richard Mille fans long to spot elements of the RMB01 that were inspired by the watch maker’s distinctive horological style.

The multi-piece wheels have been designed to resemble a tourbillon cage; the hollowed-out shapes of the forks and swingarm refer directly to the lightweight cases of the watches, and the bike’s chassis takes the form of a carbon fibre exo-skeleton from which the 997cc, v-twin engine is suspended — much like how the skeletonised movements are suspended in the watches.

Other similarities include a clutch cover resembling Richard Mille’s distinctive winding crowns and instruments that mimic the view into an RM watch movement — complete with oscillating gears that activate the rev counter and speedo needles when the ignition is switched on.

The graphics are based on those found on a typical Richard Mille dial, while the binnacle is bordered by a carbon fibre and titanium bezel featuring top-loading screws similar to those of the watches.

It’s a far cry from the machines George Brough started building after leaving his father’s car and motorcycle business on account of daddy’s standards simply not meeting those of his perfectionist son.

George kindly emphasised the fact by adding the ‘Superior’ suffix to his freshly-minted marque before wheeling-out the first new machines from his Nottingham workshop in 1919.

Within three years he was building his tuned SS80 model (guaranteed good for 80mph), taking one to the Brooklands track in Surrey where fellow competitors chortled at Brough’s incessant pampering of the bike he nicknamed ‘Spit and Polish.’

Their laughter subsided, however, when he won the experts scratch race and racked-up a new, 100mph lap record.

Brough won 51 of his next 52 races, too, only being denied victory in the last after he fell off (although his bike dutifully kept going and wobbled across the finish line first).

By the time Brough had introduced his SS100 model in 1924 (each personally tested by the proprietor to the magic ‘ton’) and the Alpine Grand Sports for hard-riding tourists, the Brough Superior legend was well and truly established and Lawrence had become its most famous patron.

He bought his first in 1922 and called it ‘Boanerges’, following with six others named George II, III, IV, V, VI and VII.

He died on the latter in May 1935 while attempting to avoid a collision with two boys on bicycles in a lane near his Dorset home, Clouds Hill Cottage.

Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw were among several big names drawn to Broughs for their exceptional fit and finish, exclusivity and reassuringly high price tags, but quality and celebrity patronage weren’t enough to prevent the marque from folding in 1940 when war stalled orders.

That left the Brough Superior name in mothballs until 2008, when it was bought by British entrepreneur Mark Upham, who revived it with a modern twist, building bikes using contemporary materials, computer-aided design and state-of-the-art construction.

Upham achieved his dream with the help of Toulouse-based engineering firm Boxer Design whose owner, Thierry Henriette, took over the re-born marque in 2013 and has since expanded the line-up by adding one new model per year (among which is one called the ‘Lawrence’ ).

In 2019, meanwhile, a collaboration with Aston Martin led to two limited edition bikes — the AMB100, a €100,000 turbocharged roadster built of 100 examples, and the track-only AMB100 Pro, an even more expensive effort based on Aston’s Valkyrie hypercar.

It was cars, too, that brought Richard Mille into contact with Brough in 2019. At the giant Retromobile classic show in Paris, Mille (the man) visited the maker’s display stand and, according to its executive director Albert Castaigne, began examining the bikes in ‘incredible detail’.

Mille subsequently visited the Toulouse factory, but it wasn’t until 2023 that he and Henriette finalised a deal to produce 150 RMB01 machines, more than 50 of which are said to have already been spoken for.

Would George Brough have approved? Almost certainly — although he might have considered the asking price to be a little on the low side.

One is expected to gasp with awe watching a SpaceX rocket take off and land back on its launchpad. Yet consider this: in 1795, without electricity, Abraham-Louis Breguet created a mechanism by candlelight to reduce the effects of gravity on a watch’s working parts — mitigating the number of slip-ups, delays and lost seconds that naturally occur on the dial.

Back then, a pocket watch sat vertically inside one’s jacket, which exerted pressure on its various components and risked sending the whole thing south. Breguet’s instrument, known as the tourbillon (French for ‘whirlwind’), tackled this vertical conundrum in the interest of accurate timekeeping. In the late 18th century, such precision — or lack thereof — could be the difference between setting sail for New York and ending up in Newfoundland.

The late 19th century, however, saw the arrival of the wristwatch, an innovation that appeared to render the tourbillon obsolete. Even today, people may say that a modern watch’s sophisticated metals and advanced configurations have replaced the need for an internal mechanism designed to ensure accuracy. Yet the tourbillon is still considered a vital tool of the watchmaker’s arsenal, its inclusion pushing a price well into six figures. It is one of the most miraculous and important horological innovations in history.

The tourbillon dates back to John Arnold, inventor of the overcoil balance spring, and was honed by Breguet in the years after the French Revolution. The Paris-based Swiss watchmaker had long made watches for the aristocracy, as well as members of the French royal family, including Marie Antoinette. This was despite his revolutionary penchants; in the late 18th century, he was earmarked for the guillotine before fleeing back to Switzerland and then to England, where he worked for George III. It wasn’t until he went back to Paris that he invented the instrument that would cement his legacy: a masterpiece of order born out of tumult and disarray.

Looking at the tourbillon in more technical terms is no less labyrinthine. The device is a gyroscope, containing both the escapement and the balance wheel. The latter is the watch’s equivalent of a pendulum, whereas the former regulates the release of energy from the balance wheel to the mainspring — that is, the spiral torsion of metal ribbon that serves as the watch’s lifesource. The tourbillon usually occupies pride of place on the watch, with its own display space on the dial, and turns as the spring pounces back and forth — although the designers of Patek Philippe, high priests of complex watch-making, have chosen to conceal theirs.

It may be complicated, but, importantly, it is not a ‘complication’. In watch parlance, something qualifies as a complication if it adds a supplementary function to the host watch. The chronograph, for instance, serves as an independent stopwatch that tracks minutes at a time; a power reserve tells you when you need to wind the watch; a moon phase reveals, predictably, what phase the moon is in.

Between 1801 — the year the tourbillon was patented — and 1945, only 1,000 such watches were made. That scarcity, a result of the complexity and difficulty involved in building such a mechanism, lent it more legend. However, as gentlemen moved from pocket to wristwatches — smaller and thinner than their pouchy predecessors — a challenge arose for tourbillon watchmakers. How could they shrink such a complex apparatus into such a minuscule structure? How could the tourbillon wristwatch get the right feng shui to be both beautiful and practical?

It would need to fly. Proverbially, that is. In 1920, watchmaker Alfred Helwig of the Glashütte’s School in Germany made the first ‘flying’ tourbillon: a version of the instrument in which the rotating cage is supported only from below, creating an open, ‘floating’ appearance. Most tourbillons these days are of this kind.

The tourbillon is watchmaking at its most dextrous and skillful. Since the 1980s, luxury brands have used the device for bragging rights, increasing their complexity and unlocking new ground. In 1986, Audemars Piguet released the Calibre 2870 ultra-thin tourbillon, a paean to the applied arts writ large. By tucking the tourbillon into a tighter space than it had ever sat in before, it was then the thinnest of its kind, as well as the first ever automatic tourbillon wristwatch. The brand has since continued to push boundaries, notably with the recently announced RD #5, a tourbillon chronograph designed to fit into its renowned Royal Oak ‘Jumbo’ Extra Thin.

Another groundbreaking moment came in 2005, when Greubel Forsey made a quadruple tourbillon, featuring four individual tourbillon cages, each containing a balance wheel and hairspring, all within the same watch. Also of note is Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso Tribute Duoface Tourbillon from 2023, where the device is visible from both the front and back of the watch. Girard Perregaux is significant, having created a double-axis tour-billon; Jaeger-LeCoultre has made a triple-axis edit. Breguet, too, is still doing its founder proud, releasing the Classique Tourbillon Sidéral 7255 this year. This is only the fifth time a Breguet tourbillon has been available to buy, joining ranks with legends such as the Marine Tourbillon Équation Marchante 5887.

Today’s innovations are solving new tricks, as well as older ones. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of flying to Los Angeles, US, to witness the unveiling of the resurrected Urban Jürgensen, an old Danish brand helmed by Alex Rosenfield and the highly respected Kari Voutilainen — 10 of whose watches have won the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. Inside the UJ-1, the first of three watches presented at this event, was hidden a wonderful tourbillon with a remarkable extra component: a spring remontoir d’égalité, which provides constant force to the escapement and optimises the watch’s energy consumption. One often forgets how much energy a watch consumes, with power stored in the barrels and released into the various components upon operation. The tourbillon is among the highest-consuming elements of a watch, yet the addition of a remontoir tempers its expenditure and gives the UJ-1 more time between winds — 47 hours, to be precise. Imagine an iPhone lasting that long.

If necessity is the mother of invention, nostalgia might be what keeps the flame alive. ‘My first tourbillon was a Breguet,’ says Ahmed Rahman, one of the most discerning watch aficionados in the world, whose personal collection includes several tourbillons. His love of the instrument comes down to ‘the history and innovation’. ‘If I could only keep one of them,’ he says, ‘it would be the Breguet.’

There will always be an appetite for the tour-billon, British watchmaker Roger S. Smith told Hodinkee Magazine; one that transcends any actual need for it as a timekeeping tool. It adds no more accuracy than a smartphone; its value lies in romance of history and craftsmanship. The tourbillon may no longer determine a ship’s safe landfall, yet it still turns with a noble purpose: a small, whirring testament to man’s mastery over Nature’s pull.

An early Rolex Oyster — arguably the most famous watch in Rolex history — is to be auctioned off by Sotherby’s in Geneva, Switzerland, this November. The timepiece, which was worn by pioneering cross-Channel swimmer Mercedes Gleitze, in 1927, is estimated to fetch more than CHF1 million (about £940,000).

The watch, encased in nine-carat yellow gold on a matching bracelet, holds a significant place in watchmaking history. Not only did it popularise the idea of water-resistant watches, it paved the way for celebrity marketing.

Mercedes Gleitze (1900-1981) was a British endurance swimmer, and in October 1927 became the first British woman to swim across the English Channel. Her affiliation with Rolex began following media pressure forced her to attempt a second crossing — after another woman claimed to have completed the feat in quicker time (the claim was later discovered to be a hoax). Unfortunately, cold temperatures meant that Gleitze did not complete the second crossing, but it cemented her reputation and that of the watch on her wrist.

In 1926, Rolex patented the Oyster case, purporting that it was the first truly water-resistant model (other brands had managed to do exactly the same, via different methods). And in the same year, founder Hans Wilsdorf jumped at the opportunity to market its hardiness by associating it with Gleitze’s ‘Vindication Swim’.

Gleitze’s relationship with Rolex continued after the event and she became the brand’s first ‘sporting ambassador’ — an almost ubiquitous title in the horological world today. The partnership is an outstanding example of Wilsdorf’s knack for marketing. As expert collector and author James Dowling notes in his new book The Rolex Legacy: ‘Like Rolex, Gleitze was an outsider, but she was also an individualist who created her own publicity and nurtured her fame carefully… [She] was a natural fit for Rolex. Not only were her many swims great publicity for the Oyster, but there was the undoubted additional advantage of the fact that she was both attractive and happy to pose in her swimsuit. This perhaps explains why there were more front page images of Mercedes in US newspapers than of Babe Ruth, when both were at the height of their careers. Whenever she was mentioned, Rolex would try to have an advertisement nearby.’

In a letter to Rolex the week after her ‘Vindication Swim’, Gleitze wrote: ‘You will like to hear that the Rolex Oyster watch I carried on my Channel swim proved itself a reliable and accurate timekeeping companion even though it was subjected to complete immersion for 10h24 hours in sea water at a temp of not more than 58 and often as low as 51. This is to say nothing about the sustained buffeting it must have received. Not even the quick change to the high temp of the boat cabin when I was lifted from the water seemed to affect the even tenour of its movement. The newspaper man was astonished and I, of course, am delighted with it.’

Sam Hines, Sotheby’s global chairman for watches, describes the moment as ‘a turning point for Rolex. From that moment forward, Rolex aligned itself with the pursuits of adventurers, athletes and professionals operating in the most demanding environments on Earth.’

The Oyster, which has been cosmetically altered since Gleitze’s swim, most likely during servicing by Rolex, last sold at Christie’s in 2000. It sold for £17,037, meaning that if it meets its estimate in November it will have increased in value by a factor of 55 times. For more information, visit the Sotheby's website.

Let’s set the scene: You want to buy a rare and beautiful vintage watch in great condition, but, with a myriad sites and sellers out there, you’re worried that what you’re about to purchase isn’t the real deal, or that you’re overpaying. Wouldn’t it be great if your second-hand timepiece came with some kind of guarantee, or a warranty like a brand new watch?

Over the last few years, major watch brands and independent artisans alike have realised that the booming vintage watch market and their reputation for quality means buyers will come to them for scarce models that have been properly serviced and authenticated. Plus, there’s something special about the fact that these repairs are being done by the people with direct access to the brand’s archives — sometimes even working from the same machines and at the same benches that turned out the watch the first time round.

IWC is the latest major brand to announce this kind of offering —joining sister companies Vacheron Constantin and Jaeger-LeCoutre, Longines and Nomos Glashutte — and it’s called ‘IWC Curated’. The carefully curated collection of vintage watches is available at selected boutiques around the world, in London, Tokyo, Dubai and IWC’s home town of Schaffhausen.

The appeal is simple: you get the very best examples of cult classics or forgotten gems, and someone else has done the hard work of finding and fixing it. The flip side is that you will pay significantly more than the going market price for the same watch. IWC’s argument will be that no-one else can sell you the same peace of mind or sympathetic restoration. There is a limit, as well, on how many watches will ever be available — unlike the hundreds you can find online — because the programme is restricted by the manpower in IWC’s servicing department.

‘It's not big scale, but the most important thing is that the customer can trust us,’ says IWC’s museum curator David Seyffer. ‘We have a lot of spare parts, but on the other hand we have three watchmakers. They are trained in restoration, so if we don’t have a part they make a new one.’

The watches themselves speak to IWC’s rich, 157-year-old history. David’s job is, in part, to take a sort of ‘greatest hits’ approach, so while he’s adamant the collection could in theory contain 19th century pocket watches at some stage, for now it focuses on what’s hot. That means original Ingenieur SLs from the late 1970s, and the ever-popular Mk 11 pilot’s watch, used extensively by the RAF from the 1940s right up until the 1980s. It will include beautiful Aquatimer dive watches — dainty by today’s standards — and forgotten rarities from the recent past, such as the limited edition Big Pilot’s. Perhaps most on-trend are the ceramic Da Vinci perpetual calendars from 1985 — groundbreaking watches from a time when the industry was emerging from a decade of strife and struggle — and the watches IWC made for Porsche Design in the 1970s and 1980s, whose titanium bracelets still have a sci-fi, futuristic feel.

David, though, prefers the classics. ‘For elegance, I would have to say the 1950s and 1960s. There are some very pure, three-hand dress watches, and you have the Caliber 89, which some journalists say is one of the best hand-wound movements ever made.’ Fortunately, for us, he’s not allowed to reserve the best finds for himself (so if you’ve always wanted a mint-condition original Portugieser you might just be in luck). However, he is duty-bound to submit anything truly unique to the brand’s museum. There are still something things that are just too precious to wear.

Watchmakers realised a long time ago that they could embellish their creations with pretty much any part of Nature’s bounteous creation. Don’t believe me? I’ve seen watches crafted out of every workable metal and precious stone — and decorated with straw, wood, feathers, flower petals and even butterfly wings. However, what happens if Nature’s earthly resources are insufficient? To where do you turn next?

NASA estimates that around 44 tonnes of space rock hurtles in the direction of Earth every year, but the vast majority burns up in the atmosphere. If we see it falling — and burning — it’s a meteor; if it survives and crashes to the ground, it’s a meteorite. And nearly all of them are mercifully small. The handful of iron-based meteorites that are both large and interesting enough to do anything with fell to Earth thousands, if not millions, of years ago.

When you hear about a watch that incorporates fragments of meteorite — usually, but not always, in its dial — the maker will have sourced it from one of two space rocks: the 26 tonne Gibeon meteorite, discovered in Namibia in 1838, or the Muonionalusta, unearthed on the border of Sweden and Finland, in 1906.

Usable meteorites are understandably rare and there is a thriving and competitive industry dedicated to their trade, as well as hunting for new fragments. In July, a meteorite sold for $5 million (about £3.65 million) at auction in New York, but has since become the subject of some controversy — after the Nigerian government alleged that it had been illegally smuggled out of the country.

The saying ‘diamond in the rough’ applies. To make a meteorite look appealing and otherworldly, you have to slice it open and acid-treat it to reveal its signature jagged patterns (known as Widmanstatten patterns, after an Austrian Count who observed them in the 1800s). The angular criss-cross motif is a result of nickel-iron crystals forming in the rock.

Meteorites have been used in countless watch dials since their popularity first boomed about a decade ago (this was due to both changing tastes and advances in dial-making techniques), but many brands reserve their use for strictly limited and even off-catalogue products. See: Rolex, which stealthily added two new meteorite-dial Daytona models to its collection earlier this year. They retail — if you’re lucky enough to get the chance to buy one — at around £40,000, and change hands on the second-hand market for almost double that.

Some brands are little less secretive and both Omega and Zenith have released meteorite-dial versions of their flagship chronographs (the aptly-named Speedmaster Moonphase and the punchy Chromomaster Sport, respectively). There seems to be something that collectors find particularly appealing about the juxtaposition of colourful chronograph subdials and a silvery meteorite background.

However, as is so often the case, it is the smaller, independent brands that have really embraced the meteorite’s creative potential. Earlier this month, Toledano & Chan — founded between Hong Kong and New York City during the pandemic — announced a version of its cult favourite B/1.2 watch (above). As well as the dial, the case and buckle are both made from meteorite. The combination of Widmanstatten patterns with the watch’s already-angular design (it was inspired by New York’s Brutalist architecture) has a striking effect.

Toledano & Chanis is not the first to encase an entire watch in the material. In 2016, De Bethune did the same thing to its Dream Watch 5 model, using metallic meteorite in shades of blue and purple. It wouldn’t look out of place in a science fiction film. More recently, Massena Lab and Unimatic made an even more literal reference to outer space. The white ceramic version of the latter’s Modello Quattro featuring, of course, a meteorite dial, is the third in a trilogy of limited edition pieces, produced in official partnership with NASA.

Meteorite’s greatest strength — its singular appearance — is also its weakness because, rare exceptions such as De Bethune aside, there aren’t a myriad ways you can use it. Furthermore, the rock’s signature texture risks becoming a ubiquitous feature, rather than an unexpected treat, as more brands get their hands on it.

Bremont recently found a way to subvert expectations with its recently launched Altitude MB Meteor Stealth Grey. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the dial is made from meteorite, but, during testing, the brand concluded that the space rock was too brittle to use (disclaimer: the MB series is designed to withstand ejection from a fighter jet). Instead, they decided to recreate the texture using good old earthly titanium embossed with a meteorite-like pattern. Ironically, brass is better equipped to take to the skies than the very material that fell out of it.

Who? The surfing financier

What? A Breitling Top Time Triumph chronograph

You will have seen him on the terrace of George, where he holds his afternoon meetings. During the week, he is a model modern Mayfair hedgie, whose working uniform is dictated by the social-media feeds of half a dozen modern-classic menswear influencers: Gaziano & Girling made-to-order slip-ons (not bespoke, yet), flannel trousers from Brunello Cucinelli (slimline, of course) and a close-fitting, soft-shouldered cashmere blazer (when formality requires).

Peeking out from underneath the cuff of his white shirt (open neck), amid a tangle of man bangles and beach bracelets testifying to the diving holiday in Thailand to which he treated himself last bonus time, you will see the ice-blue dial of his Breitling Top Time Triumph chronograph. It is a watch that reveals the man he becomes as soon as the markets close on a Friday, when, in his leathers and on his Triumph Thruxton RS 1200, he is to be found heading west on the A303 to pursue his passion for surfing and commune with his inner he-man.

But, his is a personality in tension between his high-powered motorbikes and his concern about the environment (don’t get him started on the state of our rivers). To assuage his guilt, he has devised his own personal offset programme and, come sunrise on Saturday, he conducts a beach clean before heading out into the bay: Breitling’s Surfrider partnership on his mind and an orange-dial Breitling Superocean, with environmentally correct orange Econyl strap made from recycled fishing nets, on his wrist. Back in town, he indulges in his guilty secret—watching Point Break for the 107th time, and promising himself that this is the year he will chuck in the job and follow waves around the world… but reality prevails and, by Monday, he is back safe and sound on the terrace at George.

Who? The art-loving tech billionaire

What? Vacheron Constantin, Unique Creations, Les Cabinotiers

He was previously little known outside Palo Alto, until news broke that he was divorcing his wife of 35 years. They had been high-school sweethearts, a fixture on the organic farmers’ market circuit and thought to have the most stable marriage in Northern California.

The high point of their year was an annual hiking holiday in Oregon in matching cargo pants the colour of Gangetic mud and zip-fronted recycled polar fleeces executed in a daring shade somewhere between porridge and concrete. But that was before he commenced the affair with his art advisor (whatever you do, don’t call her an art dealer): a French countess who wrote a doctoral thesis on Mannerist Art, once worked at the French ministry of culture, speaks six languages (including fluent billionaire) and has one of the largest collections of Birkin bags outside the People’s Republic of China. She has opened tech billionaire’s eyes — and his bank account — to the beauty of art. Out went the cargo pants and polar fleeces and in came the Loro Piana in tasteful shades of slate and cereal. He is looking noticeably younger and leaner since he engaged the services of a longevity advisor, a dietician, two personal trainers (one for cardio, the other for functional strength training), a goat-yoga specialist and a spirituality consultant.

When he is not busy extending his lifespan, he roams Europe in his Gulfstream making offers on artworks, the bigger the better. He was very frustrated when the Louvre turned down his offer for Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana —all 724 square feet of it. In order to soften the blow, a helpful curator suggested that he get in touch with Les Cabinotiers, the bespoke department of Vacheron Constantin, which has the rights to reproduce in miniature enamel painting any work of art in the museum (except the Mona Lisa).

The trouble is that, such is the size of the original, that it will need to be painted, in ‘instalments’ on five or six watches. The project could take more than a decade as each dial takes between one and two years to complete and, for obvious reasons, the same miniature enamel painter has to be used for all the watches.

Just as well that tech billionaire has a spirituality consultant to help him remain patient and a longevity advisor to ensure that he lives long enough to take delivery of the entire series of watches.

Who? The young aesthete

What? A Cartier Tank Normale

The young aesthete looks like a fashion model, tousled Neronic curls tumbling over an alabaster-smooth forehead and features so well defined that they beggar the terms chiselled and sculpted. He could have walked straight out of a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement.

But his is not the world of walking the runway or featuring in big-budget fragrance advertisements; instead, he describes himself as an old soul in a (beautiful) young body. He was born into a celebrated northern-Italian industrial dynasty and, after studying (and partying) at Le Rosey (the jet-set Eton), where he learned how to ski gracefully and order Champagne with aplomb at the GreenGo nightclub in the Gstaad Palace, he dutifully followed his family’s wishes and read International Economics and Management at the prestigious Bocconi university in Milan, where his father and grandfather had studied.

At least, he tried, but he found himself profoundly unmoved by the dynamics of globalisation and the role of cultural differences at central banks in determining monetary policy. His life changed when he read the memoirs of Baron de Redé, the Parisian dandy who lived a life of beauty, comfort and supreme elegance in the Hôtel Lambert, where he threw the famous Bal Oriental in 1969.

The young aesthete dropped out of Bocconi and fled to Paris where, with only the income from his trust fund to maintain him, he spent his time being instructed in the 400 different varieties of white shirts available to bespoke customers of Charvet, being fitted for suits at Cifonelli, curating his Instagram feed (@flaneuretdandyparisien), and buying Cartier watches. His current favourite is this year’s Tank Normale on a platinum bracelet — he finds yellow or pink gold a little vulgar and steel far too practical, but this icon of understatement suits him perfectly and can be worn under the close-fitting cuffs of his dazzling white Charvet shirts.

A man of simple tastes, he is perfectly satisfied with the very best.

Who? The veteran film director

What? A Rolex Submariner

The veteran film director is the grand old man of British cinema, his unimpaired memory recalling with crystal clarity a career that began almost 60 years ago, working on David Lean’s film adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, not that you see his name on the credits. He was an assistant to the second assistant director on the second unit, but it was an experience that confirmed his love of cinema and furnished him with the first of a store of anecdotes with which he regales starstruck audiences at film festivals and conventions and has filled two volumes of memoirs.

When working on Zhivago, he became friends with screenwriter Robert Bolt and later worked on the film adaptation of Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, where he met his wife. They are still married more than 50 years later, living happily in Buckinghamshire, surrounded by mementos of a rich, diverse and distinguished career in film and television. Everywhere one looks, there are pictures of the veteran director with all the greats of late-20th-century cinema — actors, directors, and producers alike — as well as trophies from film festivals and awards ceremonies around the world.

These days, his rambling farmhouse is a place of pilgrimage for film historians and biographers, whom he greets with old-world courtesy and a lively wit. He’s heard all the questions before and when he is asked to name his favourite trophy he looks around the room, his eyes lighting on the Emmy, the CBE and the BAFTA before returning to the well-used Rolex Submariner on his wrist.

He unfastens it and hands it to his interlocutors, inviting them to read the dedication from Roger Moore, the cue for another anecdote about how he won it from the 007 star in an all-night backgammon session on a film set during the 1970s. ‘Lovely man, Roger. His word was his bond,’ he says with well-practised timing, adding, with a chuckle, ‘and he had great taste in watches.’

Who? The architect

What? A Patek Philippe Nautilus

Approaching 60 and garlanded with the laurels of a successful career (knighthood, order of merit and honorary degrees from universities on every continent), the architect is at the peak of his powers.

Whether it is a new museum in one of the Gulf States, a library for an Ivy League University, a performing-arts centre in one or other of the ‘-stans’, a memorial of reconciliation in a former war-torn state, an airport in one of those smaller cities in China with a mere 20,000,000 inhabitants or a seven-star wellness and longevity resort in Saudi Arabia, he is the default choice for prestige projects around the world.

He came to fame during the Cool Britannia 1990s in London, when he spent time hanging out with the YBAs. His models (including one for a bridge over the English Channel) and drawings were the subject of a small exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery when it was still at Boundary Road. At that time, he had only two completed projects to his name: the house of a noted art dealer and the interior of a fashionable London restaurant in the then daring location of Hoxton.

His breakthrough was an Arts and education building in a former industrial town in the North of England that has since been likened to the Guggenheim Bilbao in its transformative power. It was the moment his career took off and, to mark it, he purchased himself a steel time-only Patek Philippe Nautilus. It has remained his signature ever since, together with the tailored blue workwear suit and collarless shirt he is always seen wearing. Having grown up during the 1970s, he was attracted by the watch’s unique design and has bought himself a new one every year, but, ever since production of the fabled Reference 571/1A ceased, he has been left in a quandary. Does he buy the white-gold Ref 5811 and hope no one notices? Or does he make a move to the Patek Philippe Grand complications?

Who? The vintage car enthusiast

What? A Chopard Mille Miglia

Ever since he was taken to his first Grand Prix by his industrialist father during the 1960s, he has been enraptured by the internal-combustion engine. He is old enough to have met the greats and he still talks of his encounter with Fangio as one of the defining moments of his life. Amherst Villiers was another of his automotive heroes and he still has his first vintage car, a Tim Birkin spec 4½-litre Blower Bentley (fitted with the famous Amherst Villiers supercharger). He bought it as a wreck back in the 1970s and he will never part from it.

You might see him parked up at the Goodwood Revival, clad in his tattered flying jacket, tweed cap and cravat. He still has the youthful grin and tumbling mop of Nero-like curls that made him so irresistible for the wives of his friends on the amateur motor-racing circuit of the late 1970s and 1980s, but it is testimony to his legendary charm that, although he has caused the breakup of at least three marriages (that he knows about), he maintains excellent relationships with all involved.

He, however, never married; the internal-combustion engine is his first, true and only love. He is always ready to talk cars — just one thing, never ever mention the Ferrari 250 GTO in his hearing. He once owned one, but, in the mid 1980s, he sold it to an American collector for close to $1 million. At first, he congratulated himself on his sagacity and shrewdness, but now that they can fetch $70 million (if you can find one), it is one of his greatest regrets in a life that has otherwise been full of fun and fast cars.

He has competed as a gentleman driver at Le Mans, but, these days, he favours the vintage rally circuit, especially the Mille Miglia Storica, the celebrated Italian event for pre-1957 cars. It was there that, during the early 1990s, he met Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, co-president of Geneva watchmaker Chopard, which sponsors the race.

As a regular entrant, he has collected almost every watch by Chopard to mark the Mille Miglia and has learned to enjoy watches almost as much as he enjoys cars. He jokes that he took up watch collecting because he needs an interest for his old age, but he shows little sign of slowing up just yet.

Once-upon-a-time, hunting for vintage watches was seen as a stuffy pursuit. Nowadays, collecting and wearing them is cool, as confirmed by some multi-million pound auction results, the patronage of A-list celebrities and absolute saturation on social media. Combined, it has also made it a lot harder to find a real bargain, but don’t let that put you off — there’s still some gems out there to discover.

In some ways, it has never been easier to jump into the world of vintage watches — and you don’t even have to leave the house. You’ll find auction details, dealers, forums and enthusiast experts to chat with, online. The downside? It can all feel a bit intimidating, especially because the vintage watch world has a language all of its own, and there are large sums of money in play, which equals greater risk. Furthermore, the quality and proliferation of fakes has never been higher.

‘The amount of information and knowledge out there can feel overwhelming,’ agrees Christy Davis, founder of pre-owned and vintage specialist retailer Subdial. ‘But the fact that someone's always going to know more than you means the pressure's off! You don't need to be the most knowledgeable, just bring an earnest interest and get on down the rabbit hole.’

Down the rabbit hole is right. Most, if not all vintage enthusiasts would agree that — even more than watch collecting in general — it’s a never-ending habit. ‘Social media is a great jumping off point,’ says Kate Lacey, vintage-watch dealer and Roseberys consultant. ‘Quite a few dealers have carved out their own very unique and accessible style — if you find one that aligns with your own, it can make the process of finding a watch quite a bit more straightforward.’

‘One of the biggest mistakes you can make,’ continues Kate, ‘is to impulse buy. It’s easy to feel that you will never see the same watch again, but unless it really is a specific design or rare reference, you may still find another.’

At some point, you will just have to take the plunge and make your first purchase. ‘The best way to actually learn is to have some skin in the game,’ says Christy. ‘You can follow all the blogs in the world, but until you actually decide to buy your first watch you won't really be forced to learn. Set yourself a budget and take your time, you'll really start to learn once you've made the decision to actually buy.’

So you know your own mind, you’ve followed a dozen vintage dealers on Instagram, signed up for Chrono24 and set up a suite of eBay searches. The question that remains for most is: How do you trust what you’re buying, and who you’re buying it from?

‘If a dealer has been in the industry a long time, it would usually imply they know what they’re doing,’ says Kate. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to ask around; get to know them; look at their stock. Check their returns policy, if there is a guarantee, service history and so on. Sometimes vintage watches can go wrong, but a good dealer will guide you through what to expect from your watch.’

‘Check reviews as a starting point,’ agrees Christy. ‘If they seem good, then test their transparency — ask something like "I'm new here, can you tell me a bit about how you've priced this watch and how it compares to the market". They should be able to give concrete examples of other pieces in the market; they'll be making a margin, that's their business, but they should be able to explain how they're priced, and you'll get a sense of just how transparent they're being when you speak to them.’

It’s important to understand how sales platforms operate. Sites such as Watchfinder and The 1916 Company hold their own stock, which they authenticate and service in-house; Chrono24 act solely as a middleman, connecting buyers and sellers without ever touching the watch, or taking responsibility for its condition. eBay, once the wild west of watch buying, has cleaned up its act, and now boasts an authentication service for watches that sell for more than £1,500. Sadly, its reputation as a hunting ground for bargains is a thing of the past. ‘It’s a great place to find lower value brands and odd references,’ says Christy, ‘but gone are the days when you could easily pick up mispriced listings. There are just too many people following watches these days.’

And so to the watch itself which, if you’ve done your required research, you will know won’t turn up in pristine condition (unless you’re very lucky and/or very rich). Originality is extremely desirable, but what is even more important is full disclosure of any work that’s been done to the timepiece. It’s rare to find one that’s completely untouched, but that’s sort of the point. To buy vintage is to buy something with history, that’s lived a life.

‘I think it helps to be slightly more open minded when it comes to buying vintage,’ says Kate. ‘It’s a very different buying experience to buying at retail — many vintage buyers don’t expect or want to buy something that’s brand new looking, but they want [it to be] as original as possible. It’s like buying a car — it might have a few little quirks that you might have to learn to live with.’

The good news is you can still find interesting vintage watches for relatively affordable sums — £1,000 should give you plenty of wiggle room. Plus, if you’ve shopped carefully, your purchases shouldn’t depreciate too much, but don’t go in thinking you’re about to turn a quick profit.

‘Some people can reliably invest well and make solid returns, but it's less easy to do and kind of isn't the point,’ says Christy. ‘The collectors that I see who make the best financial decisions tend to be buying with their heart and looking for areas of collectability that have been forgotten about. A few years later the wider community will catch up.’

‘Don’t buy into trends,’ says Kate. ‘If you really want to “invest”, start with the blue chip brands and the classic models: Rolex, Patek, Cartier… Buy the best condition you can afford. However, it’s better to just buy what you love.’

Her parting words: ‘Don’t bother with birth year watches.’

Click here to read more of Chris Hall's watch columns for Country Life

We used to joke about the British ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ summer, but these days it’s less damp squib and more of violent oscillation between heatwaves and flash flooding — for which, I think, we can thank the inexorable onset of climate change. Although its conditions may have changed, the Great British summertime remains unpredictable. Thankfully, in an equally unexpected turn of events, the nation’s watchmakers have taken it upon themselves to provide a reliable source of radiant cheer.

Leading the charge is Bamford Watch Department, which has already produced one of the cult hits of 2025 — the Deep Diver, a collaboration with storied Swiss manufacturer Girard-Perregaux. A 350-piece limited edition revival of a 1969 design, the Deep Diver’s bold combination of blocky, geometric fonts and liferaft orange, navy and white colour scheme is tricky not to like. Retro, without ever feeling dated. It’s pool-safe and comes in a presentation box shaped like a little swimming pool. Adorable.

The Deep Diver requires deep pockets (it’s £12,900), but Bamford wasn’t content with just causing a splash at the serious end of the pool — see another new collection under its Bamford London diffusion line.

The candy-coloured Bamford GMT range is best described as the horological equivalent of a tiki bar. We’re talking bezels that fade from pink to orange, like grenadine in pineapple juice, and vibrant Smartie shades of blue and green. The five-piece, textile strap range is deliberately simple and holiday-ready — and priced at £1,450.

Sticking with our foodie analogies, we move to Studio Underd0g and their recently released ‘Av0cado’ and ‘Guacam0le’ models (their words, not ours). The pairing was inspired by cheap, Chinese-made knock-off designs which, once nearly identical to Underd0g’s own designs, started to appear in colourways that had never existed under the brand beforehand. Rather than suing the imitators, Underd0g founder, Richard Bence, decided to turn their work into legitimate designs. As is usually the case with this young brand’s zeitgeisty work, ‘Avocado’ and ‘Guacamole’ sold out almost immediately.

Don’t worry if you didn’t bag one in time — perhaps Farer’s Lissom is the answer? It’s a dress watch with a difference — the difference being that it comes in a deep and rich raspberry pink (both the textured dial and suede strap). The Swiss hand-wound movement and detailed thoughtful design comes in at £1,150. And there are alternative, less full-on colourways — none of them plain though, in any way.

Another contender for Summer 2025’s poolside crown comes courtesy of Christopher Ward, whose Trident Reef collection comprises four, startlingly bright dive watches (and one sensible black one) with contrasting dials and straps. There’s something a little bit 2000s Ralph Lauren about it all — in a good way of course. The collection is available in 41mm or 44mm case sizes and they’re water-resistant to 200m. What-is-more, 2% of all sales go to coral reef conservation.

Last, but not least, comes Bremont, whose contribution is its Henley Royal Regatta limited-edition Supermarine. All they’ve done is change the textured black dial for a flat white one, but it’s made a world of difference — as has dropping the case diameter from 43mm to 40mm. The 50-piece limited edition result is more restrained than others, but no less seasonally appropriate.

I’m in a tricky spot. As a full-time watch journalist, I’m duty bound to emphasise the life-long quality of a good timepiece (I’m also allowed to say ‘timepiece’ without sounding like an idiot, although it’s a close call). But I also know that there are thousands of really great watches out there, enough for every possible environment or social situation, and I get all twitchy when I see people wearing something that really doesn’t belong. Thick dive watches with suits, for example. Now, I am aware that a lot of strict style rules are really tedious and not everyone can afford dozens of luxury watches, so think of this more as an exercise in picking the right tool for the job. A best-case scenario for all your summer occasions.

This is the Country Life guide to summer dressing for all the complete and utter watch addicts out there. Everyone else, take heed — even if you aren’t going to buy a fistful of new watches to go with your next linen shirt and deck shoes, there will be something here for you too.

The Festival

A summer staple whether you’re a mud-loving Glastonbury veteran, taking the family to Bestival, or losing yourself at Creamfields. A fancy, delicate watch is just one more thing to worry about, but your phone battery will die at some point, and you’ll need to know those set times. So make it something sturdy, waterproof, and not a family heirloom. Bulova’s bright and breezy Snorkel, a quartz dive watch on a rubber strap with a bioceramic case, is a reasonable start, as is Swatch’s Scuba Fifty — a watch produced in partnership with its more luxurious sister brand, Blancpain.

Both are available in sensible or sensational colour ways — which brings me to the other festival-going option: something that brings the party spirit. This summer, I’ll be looking at one of the many watches that does interesting things with luminous material, like Oris’s ProPilot Holstein Edition, whose dial reveals the brand’s bear mascot by night, or the Bell & Ross Diver Lum Outline, with its Tron-like luminous stencils. Perfect by day, and even better by night.

The Wedding

By now I think we’ve all had it drummed into us that the summer wedding outfit can be a bit more interesting than a blue suit (thanks Percival!). Obviously, this is one area where dress codes should still mean something, but whether you’re toughing it out in morning dress or mixing it up with separates and losing the tie, my watch advice would be the same: something small and simple on a leather strap. If it can be gold, so much the better: Omega’s under-the-radar Seamaster Cortina is a great option. Ignore the fact it’s been made to stir up anticipation for next year’s Winter Olympics, it looks cracking with formalwear thanks to its 37mm diameter and vintage-inspired lugs. It’s also worth noting that Omega just released a set of 30mm Seamaster Aqua Terra models with a new automatic movement; something it says brings the same level of quality in a smaller-than-ever diameter.

Alternatively, you could always go for a vintage watch — the width and height are guaranteed to work well with formal outfits and will be a potential conversation starter too. Just don’t spill too much Champagne on them when you take the dancefloor by storm.

The Major Sporting Event

To many of us, summer means sport. It means test matches, Wimbledon, and Grand Prix — maybe a spot of golf or sailing, not to mention Ascot, the Henley Regatta, the boat race… The list goes on and on. These days, most of these events have a luxury watch sponsor (as we discussed here), but thinking that you have to wear a Rolex Day-Date to the tennis or TAG Heuer’s new Monaco ‘Stopwatch’ edition to Formula 1 is a bit on-the-nose. (Although do take a look at Rowing Blazers collaboration with Seiko — it cuts against the grain of expensive luxury brands and brings a little fun to proceedings.)

These events have become arenas of self-promotion, as well as athletic prowess, which means that the summer sporting calendar has become the place to show off a newly acquired watch. And why should the A-list stars have all the fun? Pick something brand new, hard to get, or both, and reap the social media rewards. Right now I would plump for Tudor’s Black Bay 54 Lagoon Blue edition, Breguet’s 250th anniversary Type 20 chronograph or Piaget’s Polo 79 in white gold.

The Holiday

I advise taking a minimum of two watches on holiday, but also a maximum of two. So really, just two. Taking your whole collection so that you can take endless Instagram shots by the pool is not only trying too hard, it’s likely to prompt tricky conversations with the customs officers and potentially with your insurers. The two categories of watch you need are: something practical yet fun that can survive a beach trip/island hike/jetski adventure, and something a bit fancier for dinner.

First up, I’d suggest the newest edition of Longines’ Legend Diver, with its clean white dial. Any version of Doxa’s polished steel Sub 200, and Nomos’s Club Sport World Timer, which might be the best all-round utility watch launched this year, would also work well.

The ‘something a bit fancier for dinner’ category is one I’d also describe as ‘trying out a look that you might not get away with at home’. In that spirit, you could pack a Bulgari Aluminium Chronograph, also in white, a Zenith Chronomaster Original Lapis Lazuli, which will go well with some Mediterranean sea views, or if you’re feeling really brave, H. Moser & Cie’s Pioneer Spiced Aqua in shades of blue and orange with a white rubber strap.

There is something called Betteridge’s rule of headlines, coined by technology journalist Ian Betteridge in 2009 (but recognised for much longer), that states that any journalistic headline posed as a question can be answered ‘no’. The thinking goes that if men were definitely, undoubtedly wearing smaller watches, we as journalists would confidently assert that they were, rather than asking. It’s such a sweeping generalisation, too: if there’s one thing I know about watch fans, it’s that no two are exactly alike. At worst, it sounds like the kind of fashion-forward magazine headline that will make the mainstream majority run a mile: ‘Should you be wearing more kaftans?’ ‘Are bucket hats the new baseball caps?’ and of course, the hardy perennials, ‘Is the suit dead?’ and, ‘Is the suit back?’ The truth, of course, being that for nearly everyone, the suit never went away in the first place.

The other off-putting thing that happens when style writers start talking about men wearing smaller watches is that exhibit ‘A’ for the hypothesis is usually a cast of men whose dress sense as a whole is far from typical. If Timothée Chalamet wears tiny little Cartiers or Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks, it is entirely in keeping with his elfin, whimsical persona and does not necessarily mean that your pal Steve who works in recruitment is going to follow his lead. However, the reality is that we’ve got a generation of masculine role models that’s more diverse than ever, and that’s to be celebrated. There was a time when hip-hop stars had to conform to a rigidly defined look, and a big watch — probably iced-out — was part of it; now Tyler, The Creator, or Bad Bunny wear obscure vintage dress watches, often of the kind last seen on European dowagers.

Still, it’s fair to say that these kinds of trendsetters haven’t shifted a generation of average blokes away from their Rolex Submariners and into dinky little cocktail-hour party pieces overnight. But what they have helped to do is relax some of the insecurity around watch size. So if the question were to become ‘are men, generally, becoming more comfortable with the idea that a watch does not have to be an overcompensating act of size-based status signalling?’ then the answer would be ‘yes’. Not quite such a snappy headline, is it? We must also acknowledge that the big watch still exists, and it’s not always a sign that the wearer feels inadequate in other areas. What we’ve really got today is more choice, and more acceptance of a plurality of styles.

Nevertheless, we have seen the brands that once served us little other than big watches feel the need to offer smaller options. At Watches & Wonders this year, A. Lange & Sohne released a 34mm version of its 1815 three-hand classic; Rolex gave us a 34mm Oyster Perpetual (as well as versions in 28mm, 31mm, 36mm and 41mm) that plenty of journalists came away enthusing over as the ‘sweet spot’ size. Montblanc downsized its Iced Sea diver, Bell & Ross introduced a 36mm BR-05, Oris had a 34mm Big Crown and IWC a 35mm Ingenieur. These would all have been unthinkable as men’s watches a decade ago.

We are seeing the same phenomenon among the high-end independent watchmakers as well: avant-garde specialist MB&F just released its smallest-ever watch, the SP1, an elegant, airy dome of skeletonised, open-worked mechanics measuring 38mm across. Collector favourite Berneron, whose debut design was right at the heart of 2024’s short-lived, but passionate fondness for stone dials and dress watches, is prepping its second release: a 37mm annual calendar designed to feel similar to mid-century Patek Philippe watches — because that’s what his target market is used to wearing.

Among hardcore watch geeks it’s no surprise that smaller diameters are in favour, because this is the crowd that loves vintage (always smaller) and is most reactive to trends, such as the shift away from dive watches and chronographs to dress watches. But what about mainstream buyers? Happily, we have some data here too. Pre-owned watch seller WatchFinder reported recently that sales of watches between 20mm and 30mm were up 35% over the last year, while watches sized between 40mm and 50mm were only up 11% in the same period. The company doesn’t distinguish between (stereotypically) men’s and women’s watches in its data, so the uptick in smaller sizes could have a gender bias. However, the company also told us that over the last three years, customers part-exchanging one watch for another consistently opted to go smaller more often than any other choice. Roughly 44% of part-exchange purchases saw customers trade in a bigger watch for a smaller one, compared with around 38% sizing up to something bigger and 17% staying at the same size. So maybe we’ve managed to contradict Betterdge’s law after all.

It can be easy to oversell the idea that a certain era is ‘back’; a more clear-headed perspective might be that we find ourselves living in an age where everyone, regardless of age, is on the receiving end of relentless nostalgia marketing. But look: teenagers are wearing baggy jeans again, my primary-school age daughter comes home from parties with slap bands and yo-yos, and Pulp just announced a new album, so forgive me for finding a certain 1990s flavour in the air.

In watchmaking, the return of the 1990s — not, it must be said, horology’s most glittering decade — has been heralded a few times already in the last five years. First, vintage connoisseurs started telling anyone who’ll listen that it was all about 1990s dress watches from the likes of Breguet, Blancpain and Audemars Piguet. Then, brands that like to dabble in pop culture references — like TAG Heuer — leaned into the idea of the 30-year nostalgia cycle. If you’re a wealthy, successful Millennial, there’s a chance a Mario Kart watch does more for you than one with Popeye on it, or a melancholy watercolour painting of Lake Geneva.

This summer, however, the 90s wristwatch revival is hitting more mainstream notes. On May 8, Swatch launched the ScubAqua collection (left), a successor to its 1990 dive watch, the Scuba 200. Despite the mouthful of a name — ‘Skoo-backwa’ just doesn’t roll off the tongue — it’s a five-piece collection that’s achingly 90s, all see-through plastics and E-number colour palettes; a Woolworths pick-and-mix counter for your wrist. It’s brought up to date by the bioceramic case (as seen on the now-ubiquitous MoonSwatch), but the chunky bezel, two-tone rubber strap and visible movement are pleasingly retro.

For slightly more grown-up budgets — but equally youthful and poppy in style — there’s the TAG Heuer Formula 1 collection. The original did make its debut in 1986, but it was enduringly popular right through the 1990s, when TAG Heuer last served as F1’s timekeeper of choice. Rather than plastic, the cases are now a proprietary composite material the brand calls ‘Polylight’, and they’ve all got brand new solar-powered quartz movements inside, but look at them: they’re so 90s they should come with a tub of wet-look, firm-hold hair gel.

Last but not least, it would be rude to have an affordable 90s watch revival without Timex. The American brand has been on a bit of a tear lately, turning out pitch–perfect heritage-inspired redesigns while also getting quietly creative in the present-day. It’s no surprise that its creative director Giorgio Galli ran Swatch’s studio in the 1990s. This year, Timex has released a 30-year commemorative edition of the 1995 Intrepid ‘Indiglo’, a 46mm quartz-powered tool watch that screams ‘family-blockbuster-movie-dad’. Of course, it retains the push-button illuminated screen that, back then, was big news. Now, all I need are some shoulder pads and a briefcase…

Few complications have achieved the enduring relevance and utilitarian elegance of the chronograph. Conceptually, it is like having a stopwatch on the wrist, one that can measure elapsed time for anything up to 12½ hours. You can use it to time a rally stage, a furlong, a boat race, a lap of a Grand Prix or, for that matter, an egg.

This versatility explains why almost every brand offers a chronograph. Some, including TAG Heuer and Breitling, are built on foundations of expertise and count their production in hundreds of thousands, but the chronograph is equally important to an ultra-low volume maker, such as Rexhep Rexhepi, often spoken of as the greatest (and most exigent) watchmaker in a generation. His long-awaited chronograph, yet to make its debut, is one of the most talked-about timepieces in collector circles.

The chronograph is a rabbit hole down which one could disappear for a lifetime and has its own language. You have to know a ‘panda’ from a ‘reverse panda’ or ‘a snail scale’. It can be elegant, as with the chronographe monopoussoir, which starts, stops and resets with a single pusher, often set within the winding crown, or a Brutalist masterpiece, such as an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph. There are high-frequency versions, most famously Zenith’s El Primero, which operates at five hertz or more, precise to at least the nearest 1/10th of a second.

Calibration alone is a discrete area of academic study — the pulsometer is, as the name suggests, for medical use. A telemeter uses the speeds of light and sound to judge distance, whereas the tachymeter is the most widely used today, its primary purpose to measure the speed of the car over a set distance. Along the way, there are charming detours to be taken in Chronographland, such as the split-seconds chronograph that permits the timing of two relatively close events, say, the first and second in a horse race. There is even a Triple Split made by A Lange & Söhne: a mechanical virtuoso that dances on the precipice of timekeeping’s outer limit, which, thanks to the triple rattrapante mechanism, enables the capture of three different timings, which could be hours apart.

Things were simpler back in 1816, when Frenchman Louis Moinet created what we now recognise as the first chronograph timepiece, with the prosaic name compteur de tierces (thirds counter). This remarkable pocket instrument, capable of measuring to 1/60th of a second, was designed for timing astronomical movements, tracing the ancient paths of stars and planets. The etymology of the name — from the Greek words chronos (time) and graph (writer) — can be traced to 1821. That year, Nicolas Mathieu Rieussec, one of Louis XVIII’s watchmakers, created a device dedicated to timing horse races. Depositing ink on a rotating dial, it measured how long it took each horse to cross the finish line and, to modern eyes, might look like a scale model of the twin-turntable system of the type used by DJs. Literally, it was writing time.

Rieussec’s legacy is celebrated with an eponymous chronograph made by Montblanc, the Hamburg-based pen brand. (I can’t help thinking that they missed a trick. What better than a pen company to revive the idea of using real ink in chronographs?) If I were pedantic, I would point out that modern chronographs no longer ‘write’ the time, they show it, so perhaps chronoscope would be a better choice of word. The name stuck, however, and the chronograph was off to the races, where it has remained ever since, at home tottering through Champagne-drenched enclosures, under the sunlight-dappled canvas of marquees or otherwise enjoying that uniquely British phenomenon, the Season.

Given the sporting nature of so many of the Season’s events, there is plenty of (chrono) scope for using your chronograph. This is not lost on watch brands. Take, for instance, Chanel, which this year allied itself to the Boat Race, now the Chanel J12 Boat Race. Prima facie, it is a strange combination, until you learn that, during the 1920s, Gabrielle Chanel was often in Britain. Her lover was the Duke of Westminster, whose family name, coat of arms and motto are used by the Grosvenor Rowing Club, which was founded in Chester in 1869 to serve what were then known as ‘the clerks and assistants’ of the city.

Venture a little further up the Thames to Henley and you enter Bremont territory, with the company’s impressive manufacturing headquarters on the outskirts of town. When Henley Royal Regatta decided to take on an official timing partner, it would have been churlish not to turn to the local firm. Until this year, Bremont’s horological contribution has been in the form of special-edition watches for members, competitors and winners, but, at last, the offering is being broadened to include a Regatta watch for the spectators lining the Thames. Alas, it is a dive-watch, not a chrono, so if you want to time the Eights as they skim dragonfly-like along the river, choose the new Bremont Terra Nova full bronze (enriched with aluminium for greater scratch resistance).

At Royal Ascot, where hooves have thundered for royal amusement since 1711, Longines has established itself as the definitive timekeeper of equestrian excellence. The relationship between Longines and racing, however, extends further, reading like a livre d’or of the Turf: the Prix de Diane Longines and Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in France, the Dubai World Cup and the Kentucky Derby, US. If it has got four legs, a tail and whinnies, Longines is all over it.

For the racing, Longines uses technology capable of tracking times to within 1/1000th of a second, but I am more concerned about my watch matching my morning coat. You can imagine my delight, therefore, when I learnt that the brand’s celebrated Conquest Chronograph comes with a dial option called Sunray Brown with black counters and a polished ceramic bezel. Sunray Brown is more of a rich and lustrous fawn, a perfect match with the classic buff waistcoat. The black counters allude to the black morning coat and the gleam of sunlight on the ceramic bezel recalls the glossiness of a well-brushed top hat. It is, in all but name, a special Royal Enclosure edition.

For automotive racing, the Season highlight is the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, sponsored by Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and TAG Heuer. Formula 1 (F1) was TAG’s entry-level line in the 1980s and, this year, the watchmaker has made a triumphant return with a capsule collection of five chronographs, their characters imparted by bright colours (my tip is the one with the lurid lime) and combinations of avant-garde materials: sand-blasted titanium, DLC, forged carbon and so on.

Otherwise, automotive action is concentrated at Goodwood, the West Sussex seat of the Duke of Richmond. Horses have raced here for centuries — Glorious Goodwood traditionally ends the Season — but the 9th Duke founded the circuit that saw motor-racing between 1948 and 1966 and his grandson, Charles, the 11th Duke, has turned that heritage into a cavalcade of motoring events, including the world-famous Festival of Speed.

Chronograph etiquette here is complex: watch brands are like mechanical moths lured to the estate’s myriad lights. To start the season in April, IWC Schaffhausen is the Official Timing Partner of the Members’ Meeting. In 2018, it developed the limited-edition ‘IWC Ingenieur Chronograph Sport Edition “76th Members” Meeting at Goodwood’. If you weren’t one of the fortunate few who secured one, IWC has chronographs galore, such as the Chronograph for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One in the Pilot line. (There is — of course — a Goodwood aerodrome, if you feel the urge to wear your pilot’s watch in its locus classicus.)

Timing partner for the Festival of Speed in July is Roger Dubuis, ‘hyper horology’ maker of over-the-top timepieces and official watchmaker for Lamborghini. The Excalibur Spider Flyback Chronograph is a monster, with a case diameter of 45mm and a Darth Vader meets Terminator aesthetic that reflects the more invigorating side of motoring. By contrast, tucked away in a large private garden approaching the house, is the Cartier Style et Luxe concours d’elegance, for which the ideal chronograph would be the elegant, two subdial, chrono monopoussoir Tortue.

No survey of chronographs is complete without a mention of Rolex; its Cosmograph Daytona must be the world’s most famous. The sanctum of sanctums, the Rolex Driver’s Club, is about as close as the Festival of Speed gets to having a Royal Enclosure, frequented by Rolex testimonee and motor-racing legend Sir Jackie Stewart, a partner since 1968. At the far end of the Season is vintage-clothing extravaganza Goodwood Revival, where Rolex is official timekeeper. The perfect accompaniment would be a pre-Daytona chronograph, say the Ref 3525, produced from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s.

Don’t get me started on vintage chronographs. If you thought contemporary versions were plentiful and varied, they are but drops in an ocean of historic chronography.

For the ladies by Ginnie Chadwyck-Healey

It was Cheltenham Gold Cup day 2025 that proved we are heading in the right direction. As much as we saw many racegoers sporting the classic head-to-toe tweed, top-handle bag, suede boots and trilby hat, one lady — interviewed on television — stood out for me. Her entire outfit had been upcycled, reworked and re-accessorised, all from her own wardrobe. On a day of fast racing, slow fashion was the winner. She was colourful, confident and quite different — her style entirely her own.

It’s possible some of you have a drawer brimming with heirlooms, Granny’s brooches, silk scarves, evening gloves, pocket watches — an odd assortment of things we aren’t quite sure how to bring back to life in 2025. Times move on, but fashion is forever cyclical (I must have written that thousands of times over the years) and, as we approach the Season, with all its whimsical touches, dress codes and formalities, it’s the accessories to which we need to pay close attention.

Comfort is queen

I maintain that the art of accessorising — indeed, the art of style — has a lot to do with comfort. You can wear the greatest dress, slip on the prettiest heels and don an eye-catching hat, but if any part of that outfit is remotely uncomfortable, you’re in for a long day of pain. Too cold in a long, wafty dress at Henley? Even if you can borrow a Leander blazer from a friend, that’s an entire day’s outfit lost to poor planning. Shoes pinching as you enter the Royal Enclosure at 10am… by 10.28am, you’re on the hunt for a Compeed plaster. Rain stops play at Lord’s (it’s England, after all) and you’ve only got that free (unsightly) umbrella emblazoned with some big corporation’s name? Not the done thing. Half-time divot-stomping at the polo, yet you’re in stilettos and sinking into the lawn? Rookie error.

Simply the best

The etiquette of accessories is easy; keep it simple. Don’t carry an umbrella or bag that’s too large or impractical. If you use a fan to cool you down (elegant and demure if it’s a traditional hand-held one, a whirring, battery-powered example is far too ‘Christmas cracker’), avoid overusing it to the point where you’re swatting away your own elegance. For seeking shade from the sun, a baseball cap is definitely too casual and a wide-brim sunhat is fairly likely to annoy your neighbour. Instead, try a chic rattan visor for the ladies and a Panama for the gents (unless it’s Royal Ascot, but you know this).

For keeping warm, always have a layer that isn’t obviously an afterthought, should you get too cold. A big dollop of a navy blazer will ruin the delicacy of a pretty dress. Try a shawl (Hera Cashmere is a lovely option) if you can’t find the right formal jacket. Always road test whether the layer fits, rolled up, in your bag.

Match made in heaven

You might choose to invest in a new bag from names such as Strathberry, Mashu, DeMellier or Aspinal of London, but don’t attempt to match it to the colour of an outfit. You’ll never use it again if you do, I assure you. Instead, consider metallics (avoid glitter; too ‘party’) as a neutral, because such bags are smart and easy to find when you don’t always want to have cream, nude or peachy accessories. Metallics will have staying power in your wardrobe long after the summer.

As for ‘matchy matchy’, it doesn’t have to be a precise match between the colour of your outfit and accessories. Case in point: The Princess of Wales at the Commonwealth Day Service last month. Her outfit had two different reds at play (tomato and crimson), but she married them into a neat synergy by ensuring that her hat exactly matched her shoes (and, indeed, the red chairs of Westminster Abbey). She didn’t do matching coat, bag, hat, shoes as she might have done in the past, displaying the confidence of matching just enough, but not every single aspect.

What, this old thing?

Sometimes, it’s simply not feasible to splurge on an expensive accessory you might wear only once. The good news is that hiring or renting accessories (or even the whole outfit) is the norm in 2025. (A study by Westfield shopping centre found the UK clothing rental market has a potential value of £923 million).

One of my favourite British milliners is Camilla Rose, who reports about 60% of her business is now rental. ‘It gives people flexibility to explore more hats without the commitment. Those who do purchase often have more than one outfit in mind and we are happy to tweak previously purchased hats.’ Generally, with the focus on circularity in fashion (reuse, rewear, recycle), ever more brands are happy to offer tweakments to designs and that’s where you, the customer, can engage your own ideas. Haberdashery heaven V V Rouleaux has a treasure trove of trimmings to revive previously worn accessories. Ribbons, buttons, butterflies, feathers, flowers on wires — for the experimentalists among us, these are often the most attractive part of the Season.

It’s all about balance — find the sweet spot between functionality and style and, remember, accessories should enhance, not overwhelm, your outfit. Follow the etiquette, embrace the formalities (know the terrain!), but, importantly, have fun with it. Accessories are your chance to add personality and a touch of flair; for men, tie pins, neckerchiefs and pocket watches are up there. Hats are my favourite and I still have a James Smith & Sons ladies umbrella on my wishlist. Then there’s the velvet opera coat longing to go out, currently destined for my children’s dressing-up box…

My final and most practical tip?

Take a handbag with handles long enough to hang from a wrist or shoulder so you can go hands free. How many times have you wanted to hold a glass of fizz in one hand when studying a race card, but had awkwardly to clutch a bag? How many times have you not had hands free to clap the speeches at a wedding? How many times have you wanted to shake hands only to realise you’re proffering… an elbow. No more! Is that me trying to help you justify a new handbag from Mashu? Perhaps…

For the gentlemen by Tom Chamberlin

For years now, a rather dashing German gentleman has trotted into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot in immaculate morning dress, complete with a stiff collar, cane and spats. He looks very fine and is a grand reminder of the Edwardian era, when everyone dressed like that. Standards of dress have certainly slipped since then and his valiant resistance is to be commended, but when it comes to accessorising, he does need an update.

Accessorising offers the true wheat-chaff-sorting exercise, sartorially speaking. A bespoke suit is a wonderful thing, but there are great ready-to-wear options that will send you out into the world a new man. What distinguishes the best dressed is how they accentuate a dress code with flourishes that set them apart.

On your own head be it

There was a time when hats were ubiquitous for men. The sad decline is an impediment to any truly stylish society, but the summer will still probably require any of three hats — the top hat, the bowler hat and the Panama hat. A top hat is the most formal option and should only be worn with morning dress or white tie. Although it is de rigueur in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and at Buckingham Palace garden parties, it is not something I would recommend for a wedding. You will regret carrying it around all day between the service and reception and trip home. Renting a top hat is, to some extent, fine, but if you are regularly going to events in the summer, it will become a false economy when you could buy one that will last you the rest of your life.

If you want to be really smart, try to find one made in vintage silk. The silk plush you see on these hats cannot be made any more after a brotherly brouhaha that resulted in the factory burning down and the last of the machines that made this fabric being lost.

The bowler hat is largely for cavalry and guards officers, who have various marches in May. Owing to royal attendance and vast numbers of dashing officers keen on a convivial luncheon, these tend to become something of an occasion.

The Panama hat is for any occasion that requires some level of dressing up and being outdoors. From Wimbledon to Glorious Goodwood, Henley to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, you should have something that shields you from the elements and a hat appropriate for a jacket and tie. Fedoras are fine, but the beaver felt you’d most commonly find with it can make things quite warm, so the breathability of the Panama, not to mention the smart ribbon that can correspond with your old regiment or club, is much more fun.

Come rain or shine

From a historical point of view, some say, the umbrella offers a great distinction between us and the French. Our friends across the Channel eschewed the umbrella years ago because, according to a French 18th-century magazine, to have one meant you could not afford a carriage. In Britain, since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, we have taken sodden clothing with great cultural pride, so being out in the elements when it rains is par for the course and an umbrella is not even meant to be used if the rain comes. Have a look at old images of people such as Anthony Eden and the tightly furled umbrellas they carry with them. A guards brigadier once told me that, to get the umbrella looking like a scabbard, they would remove the metalwork inside, rendering the umbrella useless as a means of shelter.

My recommendation is to have an umbrella on your person at all times. It helps with posture and is a great opportunity for chivalry, as long as it works.

Jacket ephemera

The jacket is where most good accessorising can take place. There are some rules to adhere to, but these aren’t defined by a dress code, so you can use artistic licence. A pocket square and tie should be bedfellows, but never match — this is naff (and a bit Pete Hegseth). Instead, they should have some colour co-ordination and support the jacket, rather than stand out from it. Lapel pins, chains and boutonnières are smart, but, again, wear in a cautionary manner. They should be relevant to you, as people will ask about them. I sport a 1950s Dunhill lighter as a lapel chain: it was my grandfather’s and people derive great joy from seeing it work.

Follow, for example, the sturdiest of the Royal Family, Mike Tindall. Although his physique creates a bit of heavy lifting for clothing to flatter and cope with the scale, he emerges with a lot of plus marks through his accessorising. His tie often matches the outfit of his wife, Zara, a sweet detail, and he turns to tie bars and lapel pins to fill the vast expanse of his chest and shoulders. Indeed, at Ascot, he is often the very best dressed.

Wristy business

The watch is Head Boy of men’s accessorising. It is a complicated topic and there is no way of simplifying it without upsetting an industry that has poured billions of Swiss francs into development, engineers and tiny components all designed to track the passing of time accurately.

However, I think there are two types of watch you can consider for any social occasion: the sports watch and the dress watch. The former should be worn with anything that is lounge suit or less formal and the dress watch is for a lounge suit and more formal. The distinction is the dimensions and strap. A dress watch usually comes with a leather strap and slimmer watch (although this is not always the case, metal straps for formal occasions can be very smart indeed). There are those who say you shouldn’t wear a watch with black tie as you should be enjoying yourself without any need to know the time. This is rubbish, as dress watches for eveningwear have been made as long as there have been wrist watches.

Sports watches usually come with a linked metal strap, often steel, but, if you have gold, then good for you. Some sports watches are inherently very smart. Mark Birley wore an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak with his formal attire and, if a sports watch was good enough for him, then it is good enough for you.

Well trodden

Socks are simple. They should be navy blue, which works for everything except black tie, when black should be worn. Alternatively, they can coordinate with another part of your outfit. I like to wear sky-blue socks to match my morning-dress waistcoat. Patterns are a no no and try to get knee-high socks, as you should never show hairy skin when you cross your legs.

Shoes are the most important element of a look. They should be black for formal attire, such as morning dress or black tie. With a suit, black is appropriate for a navy one, but not much else. When wearing grey, you should go brown (not tan, ever) or burgundy. These two colours of shoe work for anything lighter than navy, so make sure they are in your roster and, of course, they should all be well polished, too.

As for spats, the Buckingham Palace garden party apparently witnessed their demise when George V once emerged not wearing them; guests quickly removed theirs and disposed of them in the bushes.

It’s an odd question, when you think about it. Can a luxury watch be Brutalist? Some have a basic practicality in their ancestry — watches that originated in times of warfare, for example, were engineered for keeping time in the most hostile conditions. You could call them utilitarian, perhaps.

But Brutalist? Not only do many of them pre-date the term itself, but they struggle to evoke the very specific style that we associate with the movement, either in their original form or their present-day, more luxurious guise. Then you have the more opulent end of the spectrum, closer in aesthetic to a rococo state ballroom than a concrete car park. There’s nothing brutal about a Bovet or a Breguet, except perhaps occasionally the price.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) defines Brutalism as ‘a style with an emphasis on materials, textures and construction, producing highly expressive forms’. That sounds a bit closer to home, horologically speaking — but it’s also quite broad.

The material in question is usually concrete (beton brut being the French term), as beloved of architects like Le Corbusier who in a curious coincidence — for our purposes at least — was born in La Chaux de Fonds, the Jura town best known as the cradle of traditional Swiss watchmaking. And the ‘emphasis on construction’ tended to mean exposed air vents and chimney stacks. Watchmakers like showing off their movements, but again, it’s not quite the same thing.

So why are we even asking the question in the first place? If there’s so little common ground between the massive, slab-sided form of the National Theatre and the polished flanks of a Rolex Day-Date, why connect the two? Because despite the potential chasm between them, several influential watchmakers have in recent times paid direct tribute to Brutalist styles, creating watches — and in one case, an entire brand — that they say are inspired by Brutalist architecture.

At the same time, we have also seen a spike in demand for blocky, angular, asymmetrical designs in the vintage world, such as the Rolex King Midas, a five-sided irregular dress watch with a tapered bracelet, first introduced in 1964.

The most high-profile modern example has come from Audemars Piguet, with its [Re]Master 02, which it labelled ‘a tribute to Brutalism. The watch is based on a design from 1960 known as reference 5159BA, and features a lop-sided, sharp-edged case shape with a multi-faceted crystal display (so unusual in its dimensions that AP had to carve out a slice from the inner left hand side to allow the minute hand to rotate properly).

It’s definitely a ‘highly expressive form’, to return to RIBA’s words, and anyone who has worn one will confirm that it is surprisingly massive — another Brutalist trait, and not an easy one to execute in wristwatch form. Texture is represented too, in its brushed ‘sand gold’ case, but pulling at this thread slightly undoes the 02’s Brutalist leanings, because like all fine watchmakers, Audemars Piguet takes particular care over the delicate surface finishing of its cases (and movements) and that’s rather at odds with brutalist notions of rough, crude exteriors.

Another brand making a direct connection to Brutalist architecture is Toledano & Chan, the New York and Hong Kong indie start-up whose debut design, the B/1, is a direct homage to the Met Breuer building in New York, and specifically its asymmetric extruded windows. Founders Phil Toledano and Alfred Chan bonded over a love of Brutalism, among other things, and make perhaps the most credible link between a watch and the aesthetic.

In doing so, however, they aren’t taking an overly literal approach: the B/1 is still luxurious in familiar ways, from its bracelet polishing to its lapis lazuli or mother-of-pearl dials. ‘Architecture is highly adjacent to watch nerdery,’ says Toledano, and it’s clear that the watch design blends the two passions. The B/1 has also attracted its fair share of comparisons to the King Midas.

What about less retro-focussed brands? Richard Mille, whose watches typically use unconventional materials, exposed mechanisms and idiosyncratic shapes in the service of an aesthetic that’s more future-industrial than Brutalist, recently released an updated version of its RM 16-02 Extra Flat that it says ‘reinterprets the brand's well-established aesthetic codes, showcasing a resolutely Brutalist style with its straight lines and monolithic structure.’

From the front at least, the watch appears not to have a curved line to its name, although of course the requisite wheels and gears are still present. It has redesigned the movement’s dial-side plates, come up with a new typeface, and even re-routed the traditional minute track along a zig-zag path: the end result does rather look like an aerial view of a Brutalist city plan.

Other Swiss brands, or watches, possess elements that nod to Brutalism without going the whole way. Patek Philippe’s Cubitus is sufficiently rectangular and emphatic, but far too conventionally decorated; some small independent brands like Kollokium, Ochs & Junior, Lebond and Alto all flirt with various Brutalist-lite notions like rough textures, geometric cases, asymmetric shapes and minimalist blank surfaces, but none could truly be said to channel a Brutalist spirit.

Perhaps the conclusion is that luxury watchmaking can never quite overcome the ideological gap between its devotion to precision and adornment and real Brutalism’s rigid, undecorated principles. But the fact that watchmakers are even trying has given us some fascinating results.

Of all the elements associated with a watch, the ‘big hand, little hand’ concept is about the most basic. We are so primed to understand the relative angle of these two lines that some independent watchmakers — like Ressence or H. Moser & Cie — do away with practically everything else. But with all orthodoxies there is inevitably a counterpoint, and this year has seen a real resurgence of watches designed with no hands whatsoever. At the Geneva watch fair Watches and Wonders, the horological world’s annual get-together where every significant brand shows its wares, watches with miniature window displays were the hot thing everywhere you looked, from Cartier to Bremont.

I say resurgence, because the idea is not a new one. It made its original appearance on pocket-watches of the 19th century, particularly those produced by IWC and known as ‘Pallweber’ models after their original inventor; the style then enjoyed a renaissance during the Art Deco era, when watchmakers combined their new and exciting wristwatches (in all manner of shapes) with window-led displays, the geometric form of case and porthole combining neatly. Cartier was among them, which will be no surprise to anyone familiar with its pioneering approach to design, and this year its flagship launch was a revival of the Tank à Guichets, a version of the classic Tank Louis Cartier with its dial completely enclosed in either gold or platinum, save for two small apertures through which one can read the hour and minutes.

A note on terminology: ‘guichet’ is usually translated as ‘window’, which might jar with anyone whose schoolday French included phrases such as ‘la fenetre de ma tante est ouverte’ — but the translation is less in the sense of a window in a building and more that of a ticket office or cashier’s counter window. Such watches are also usually referred to as ‘jumping hour’ models, because while the minute display rotates consistently in the same way as a hand would, the single numeral displaying the hour remains static for almost 60 minutes and then (depending on the engineering below) either switches over gradually in the space of a few minutes, or more commonly ‘jumps’ abruptly at the top of the hour. There’s a level of visual theatre that appeals to watch geeks.

Earlier in the year, Louis Vuitton kicked off the trend with its Tambour Convergence (left), an unashamedly Deco style that stacked the hours and minutes together, leaving the rest of the case free — in the platinum model, it seized the opportunity to set it with diamonds. At Watches and Wonders some brands followed Cartier’s approach of a solid case with ‘guichets’, like Bremont’s surprising Terra Nova Jumping Hour in bronze, while others took a more conventional tack, incorporating a jump hour display into a dial, underneath a sapphire crystal as usual. Among these, Chopard stood out with its magnificent L.U.C Spirit 25, whose dial was created using straw marquetry in a hexagonal pattern, while Gerald Charles marked 25 years of its brand with a limited edition whose dazzling dial almost outshone the discreet hour display at 12 o’clock.

Perhaps the most charming of all was Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso Tribute Nonantieme ‘Enamel’, which combined an ornate jumping hour display with a 120-degree ‘smile’ for the minutes and housed them both in a deep blue and gold enamelled display of the night sky, giving the overall effect of a wonderfully anachronistic astronomical device. Which, in a way, it is.

March has been a busy month for Breitling: Last week it confirmed the long-rumoured acquisition of dormant brand Gallet, a storied watchmaker that it intends to revive and reposition as an entry-level luxury sibling. Now, the brand has announced the arrival of actor Austin Butler as its latest brand ambassador. Although for watch fans, that’s not the most exciting part.

The star of Elvis, Dune 2 and Masters Of The Air was photographed two weeks ago at Paris Fashion week — where dedicated watch geeks were able to look past his smouldering gaze and loose Saint Laurent tailoring to spot a Breitling on his wrist that didn’t seem to exist anywhere else in the world.

The stealth red carpet tease has become a bit of a staple trope in recent years, perfected by Omega and Daniel Craig, who in his post-Bond era has affected a ‘who, me?’ air of innocence while carefully showing just enough of an unreleased watch to set the internet alight. Now Breitling is in on the act, and we can reveal that Butler’s watch is in fact the first of a brand new collection, the Top Time B31.

Breitling introduced the Top Time chronograph in 1964 as an alternative to its established lines of pilot’s watches and marketed it at the nascent muscle car generation. It remained in the range until the company ceased operations in 1979; when it was revived in 1982 the Top Time was deemed surplus to requirements. In 2020, the name was revived, once again on a line of chronographs aimed at petrolheads.

This new model marks the addition of a simple time-only design to the Top Time line. Available in three dial colours — green, blue and white, each available on a stainless steel bracelet or leather strap — they will cost £4,550 for leather and £4,850 for the bracelet. Measuring 38mm across and water-resistant to 100m, the range also marks the introduction of a brand new automatic movement, Calibre B31.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first simple, non-chronograph movement Breitling has designed and built in-house in its 140-year history. Recently, it has relied on movements sourced from rival brand Tudor under a deal struck in 2017, whereby in return for Tudor’s time-only calibres, it would sell Tudor its B01 in-house chronograph for use in its Black Bay models. Now, with an automatic movement all of its own and a growth strategy that will soon involve multiple brands, that deal may be about to run its course.

Breitling, under the leadership of CEO Georges Kern and with the energetic backing of private equity investors Partners Group, is on an ambitious path that will eventually see it sit at the heart of a watch brand conglomerate to rival Richemont or Swatch Group. In 2023 it announced that it had bought up Universal Genève, another highly respected Swiss watch brand that had drifted into irrelevance. Last year, it showed the first hints of a product line-up that will see Universal revive references popular with vintage collectors, and confirmed that it will sit above Breitling’s core price point as a more exclusive and refined brand.

Gallet, which like Universal is best known for its chronograph watches of the 1950s and 60s, will be positioned slightly beneath Breitling in price, offering a more entry-level option. Kern has confirmed that it will be stocked alongside Breitling in its boutiques, while Universal Genève will have its own separate retail operation. Expect revivals of models like the Flying Officer and Multichron Clamshell chronograph, tool watches that Gallet introduced during the Second World War.

What do film director Quentin Tarantino, basketball legend Kobe Bryant and, um, Queen Victoria have in common? All of them have, at one point or other, owned a coveted Girard-Perregaux timepiece.

The haute horologists have been a byword for Swiss excellence since they were founded in the remote Jura mountains in the late 18th century, with Monsieur Constant Girard going on to produce the first ever commercial order for wristwatches. Even within the rarefied world of Swiss watch-making, theirs is a backstory built on true artisanry, keeping production in-house and passing down closely-guarded craftsman skills through the generations.

As such, Girard-Perregaux (the latter name for Constant’s horologist wife, Marie Perregaux, who hailed from a noted watch-making lineage) are not the types for brash marketing or clout-chasing collaborations. So the new Laureato Chronograph Aston Martin Edition is notable in its arrival; two heritage heavyweights devoted to precision engineering and elegant aesthetics coming together to create something worthy of both names.

The Laureato itself debuted in 1975 as a luxury sports watch conceived by Milanese architect Adolfo Natalini, and the first Swiss model to feature a quartz-powered movement. Its name derived from the latin laureātus to mean ‘crowned with laurels’ (also the Italian translation for The Graduate, a box office hit a few years earlier). The Aston Martin partnership began in 2021 and previously delivered a ceramic racing green version, but this latest edition is more subtle in its greenish finish, featuring an iridescent dial coloured, in groundbreaking fashion with 15 ultra-fine layers of automotive paint.

Beneath the hood are ergonomic touches worthy of a supercar — light and strong titanium construction, brushed and polished surfaces, engraved gilded text. Driving things is the Swiss-made GP03300 calibre, the self-winding workings of which you can spy through a sapphire caseback etched with the iconic Aston Martin winged logo.

It’s horology with horsepower, and car-lovers and watch-lovers alike should head to a Bucherer store to see how it handles. We find it pairs particularly well with some driving gloves…

The Girard-Perregaux Laureato Chronograph Aston Martin Edition is available exclusively at Bucherer from £19,300 (including VAT).

LVMH Watch Week is still a relative newcomer to the global watch industry calendar, but it’s quickly becoming a shortcut to knowing what’s in and what’s out. There were some initial scheduling setbacks — the LA fires led to the cancellation of the Californian showcase, so things kicked off in New York (January 21-22), before moving to London (until January 24) and finally, Paris (January 30-31) — but that didn’t stop a record-breaking nine brands from taking part.

TAG Heuer, Zenith, Hublot, Bulgari, Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta have all appeared before, but, this time round, they’ve been joined by three icons: Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and L’Epée 1839.

Here, we take a look at three of the most notable timepieces to launch this week.

Something extra 

Daniel Roth was a pioneer in independent watchmaking when he launched his eponymous brand in 1988 — initially focusing on his favourite tourbillon movement (which increases accuracy). 

Roth isn’t a huge name for the Arnault-owned juggernaut, but it would be remiss not to mention this Extra Plat Souscription, an updated version of the Tourbillon Souscription, which originally debuted in 1990. It is wonderfully elegant and thin (extra plat translates to extra thin) with a restrained two hand (there’s no second-counting hand) — surely what watch-lovers yearn for in a dress watch. Roth himself has said that ‘there is nothing nicer than an extra thin watch on the wrist’.

As with the Tourbillon Souscription, the Extra Plat Souscription was developed and produced by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, and features the same Clou de Paris dial base pattern. It launches with 20 pieces in yellow gold, priced at 45,000 CHF.

Year of the snake

2025 is the Chinese Year of the Snake so it is fitting that Bvlgari are launching their newest iterations of their Serpenti Collection now and with an in-house first — a brand-new, self-winding mechanical movement — hidden inside. The movement has been named the 'Lady Solotempo BVS100 Automatic'. 

Bvlgari were already known for having some of the thinnest movements on the market, but now they can add some of the smallest to the list of accolades. The Lady Solotempo technology powers the Bvlgari Serpenti Tubogas and the Bvlgari Serpenti Seduttori (above). The Serpenti’s curvilinear design demands that the movement be as dainty as possible. The result? A feathery weight of just five grams. 

Pole position 

The year is off to a speedy start for TAG Heuer thanks to the revival of the brand’s historic partnership with Formula 1: they are the Championship’s new Official Timekeeper. Congratulations are in order all round because it also happens to be the sport’s 75th anniversary. 

In celebration, the watchmaker has unveiled the Formula 1 Chronograph collection (£4,300), featuring super lightweight and hard-wearing titanium cases and striking bursts of colour that bring to mind the energy of race day. The 44mm timepiece also features a micro-perforated aluminium tachymeter bezel inspired by racing brake discs. 

Then there is the special Oracle Red Bull Racing collaboration piece to commemorate the fact that TAG has been the official partner and timekeeper of the F1 team since 2016. Keep an eye out for the caseback, engraved with the brands’ respective logos.

And we shouldn’t neglect to mention the new Carrera Chronosprint x Porsche Rallye — a tribute to the Porsche 911’s first-ever rally debut at the 1965 Rallye Monte-Carlo. The Porsche in question (above) was given all of the necessary adaptations a road car needs to take part in rallying: a rollover bar, a pair of extra front headlines and... a Heuer Rally Master timekeeping device.

The first Carrera chronograph came about around the same time when Jack Heuer — grandson of founder Edouard Heuer — designed a watch inspired by Porsche and the Carrera Panamericana race of 1954, that enabled a driver tell the time with just a glance in the heat of the action.

The updated, limited edition Carrera Chronosprint x Porsche Rallye pieces come in stainless steel (911 pieces) and 18K 3N yellow gold (11 pieces). 

The D-Day anniversary celebrations of 2024 have been many and varied, but one of the more unusual has to be ‘The Few’ collection from The Great British Watch Company, made from the wreckage of Mk 9 Spitfire ML295, which was shot down over Normandy on July 30, 1944 — 80 years ago almost to the day. As far as we know, this is the first time any Spitfire has been reincarnated in wristwatch form.

Royal Canadian Air Force 411 ‘Grizzly Bears’ Squadron pilot Harold Kramer survived the crash — hidden by the French Resistance in the loft of a cottage for a month until the Allies liberated the area — but his aeroplane did not and the wreckage was used as target practice by the Germans. After the war, it was all but forgotten until the 1980s, when it was excavated and displayed in museums around Normandy.

In 2017, vintage-aircraft enthusiast Graham Oliver transported the ML295’s remains back to England and began a £3 million restoration; it finally flew again two years ago. ‘The tail-section was completely missing and many bits were unusable,’ he says, ‘but we managed to use some of the original airworthy parts, including the cockpit surround, inboard flaps, gear selector, some of the gauges and parts of the undercarriage.’

‘I was looking for an interesting project, so I was thrilled to be given some bits of the wing — one piece has a shell-hole in it,’ explains Colin Andrews, founder of The Great British Watch Company, which specialises in bespoke, handcrafted watches. ‘I’ve managed to find enough good parts to make the dials and hands for nearly 100 watches — it’s the first time parts from a Spitfire have been used as an integral part of a watch.’

Based on the Omega CK2129, the original watch Battle of Britain pilots wore into battle, ‘The Few’ is an edition of 60. Each watch costs £19,950 and comes in a box made from a type of wood specially created for Spitfire propellors called hydulignum (‘beech laminated in thin strips and impregnated with resin’), with a leather strap, handmade silver buckle, a silk ‘escape map’ (a replica of those issued to pilots) and handmade silver cufflinks, brooch and earrings, each containing a Spitfire fragment.

‘There’s a choice of movement with the watch, either British or Swiss-made, and everything is made not only in Britain, but local to my workshop (near Chester), with the case, which has been made from steel from a British mill, having travelled the furthest at 15 miles away,’ continues Mr Andrews. ‘I hope this proves the point that the talent, skill and equipment to make watches in Britain is not only still here, but it is also possible using local businesses and resources.’

The crown, hands and dial are constructed entirely from Spitfire parts — the latter from ‘the original skin of the Spitfire… [each with] its own unique patina and scars’ — and a portion of sales will go towards the aeroplane’s upkeep. ‘Harold Kramer and the names of the other 11 pilots who flew the Spitfire are engraved on the back of each one,’ adds Mr Andrews. ‘It’s taken me five years to make this collection and the first watches will be ready in the next couple of months.’ At the time of writing, 58 of 60 had already sold and, depending on demand, there may be a further edition making the total almost 100 — ‘after that, I’ll have run out of material’; visit www.great-british-watch.co.uk. Anyone wishing to fly in the restored Mk 9 Spitfire ML295, now based at Leeds East Airport (formerly RAF Church Fenton) near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, should visit www.spitfires.com

On my bedside table is a small, bronze statuette of a begging dog holding a stick with a hook at one end from which, every night before retiring, I hang my pocket watch. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos, being linear, predictable time — as provided by my watch — and kairos, being opportune, chaotic time (immeasurable, but strangely desirable).

Anyway, my watch’s accuracy gives me immense satisfaction, as I have an interest in the jewellery firm (Streeter & Co) that manufactured it 146 years ago. The watch itself is heavy, being made of silver, and must be wound every day using a tiny key. I carry it, suspended on a silver albert, either in the breast pocket of my coat or in the change pocket of my trousers. Getting it out is quite a palaver, but, even so, I probably refer to it a dozen times a day.

Perhaps more to the point, there are very few moments, day or night, when I can’t hear it ticking. I find the steady tick, tick, tick comforting. Intellectually, I know it is an inanimate object, but emotionally I cannot help but think of it as being alive.

In the West, the idea that the non-human world has agency has rather fallen out of fashion. Fewer and fewer people seem to be aware that everything in the universe — rocks, plants, molecules, viruses — has the potential to initiate action.

"I’ve skimmed the paper, half listened to the radio, toyed with my food and slept more than usual. Mostly, however, I have been sitting in my favourite armchair"

What sort of action could my watch possibly initiate? Well, it is the antithesis of those smartwatches that control (and pass comment on) your whole life, from what you eat to when you sleep. On the other hand, it, as opposed to the tilt of the sun, normally orders my day.

I say ‘normally’, because, for the past fortnight, some (hopefully temporary) health issues have resulted in a change of schedule. Being in no condition to work, walk or read (my three main occupations), I have, essentially, been doing nothing. Oh, I’ve skimmed the paper, half listened to the radio, toyed with my food and slept more than usual.

Mostly, however, I have been sitting in my favourite armchair, staring out of the window and ruminating. One result of this has been the realisation that my watch was made in the same year, 1877, that R. L. Stevenson published An Apology for Idlers, his manifesto for voluntary unemployment.

Idleness, so far as Stevenson was concerned, ‘does not consist of doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling classes’. Interestingly, Stevenson, like so many people who promote the idea of a less materialistic, more contemplative life, was indescribably productive. He died at 44, yet still managed to write a dozen novels, several dozen short stories and innumerable essays, articles and poems.

It’s a similar story with Henry David Thoreau (Walden: or, Life in the Woods), Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing), Tom Hodgkinson (The Idler), et al. That is to say, they espouse a philosophy they do not practise.

There are, of course, exceptions, my favourite being Shoji Morimoto, who decided he no longer wanted to be a writer or, for that matter, anything else. He became ‘Rental Person Who Does Nothing’, offering his company — but no more — to anyone willing to pay his expenses.

He, too, has produced a book, but, in keeping with his principles, he didn’t write a word, only answering interview questions. In the short introduction, he boasts: ‘I have, as usual, done nothing.’

Clearly, a man with no need for a watch.

A few months back, I met a retired Austrian gentleman who was in the UK visiting his sister-in-law, a friend of mine. I’m sure she introduced him and told me his name, but, honestly, I wasn’t listening. Rather than respond with my name or even the simple courtesy of a hello, I asked him whether on his wrist that was indeed an original Omega Speedmaster MkII, a watch I happen to be partial to, but had never seen in the wild.

It was. He’d bought it in the early 1970s, not because he was working for NASA (we’ll get to that), but because, as he said with familiar watch-buyer economy, he liked it. He kindly removed it and allowed me to admire its almost seamless barrel-shaped case, its punchy reddy-orange dial detailing and the now smooth and slightly loose links of its metal bracelet.

This, as I reminded him, was the watch Omega that designed for Apollo astronauts to wear on the moon, unlike the Speedmaster Professional, affectionately known as the Moonwatch on account of the fact it actually went to the moon — unlike the Speedmaster MkII, which never did. Something to do with astronaut superstition, a retired NASA engineer once told me.

He knew this, of course, but seemed pleased to have someone to talk to about it, even if I’d clattered through our formal introduction only moments before, eyes squarely on his wrist. What I didn’t know, this being his watch, was that in five decades of ownership, he’d only had it serviced once, yet there it was, still ticking away accurately enough. Omega’s mechanical watches of the 1970s were that good.

I have no tangible connection to the MkII. My parents hadn’t even met when it was made. Yet, having discovered the story behind it in 2014 when Omega re-released it (sadly, without meteoric success), it has become a watch I’d gladly own some day. Why? I’m not entirely sure. I suppose I like the look of it and I do rather enjoy the strained irony hidden in its story (its case shape was designed so it wouldn’t catch on and tear a spacesuit. Useful, you’d think). I like the fact that few people know about it and that it has enormous icebreaker power, as this insouciant little anecdote suggests. As yet, I don’t own one, but the truth is, I’d as happily own the revival piece as the original, no matter how serviceable those retro pieces have proved. To my mind, the story and the aesthetic are wrapped up in both the old and the new.

I suspect as much is true of almost any revival luxury watch introduced over the past few decades — which is most watches. Since the 1990s, Swiss watch brands have been tearing through their archives in search of great designs, many finding rich pickings in their basements. TAG Heuer was among the first, asserting its new-found desirability that decade by reinstating the Carrera and the Monaco, both 1960s designs and now collection linchpins and industry archetypes.

Many others have played the same hand. You could pick Blancpain and its Fifty Fathoms; Cartier and its Santos; Tudor and its Black Bay; Oris and its Divers Sixty-Five; Vacheron Constantin and its newly minted Historiques 222; and many more besides. All watches with a vintage aesthetic plucked from the past and refeathered for contemporary audiences, who lap up the promise of design longevity and modern mechanics.

The biggest of the Swiss watch brands have made this regenerative approach an art form, basing almost their entire businesses on what they did before. Breitling’s growing popularity is hugely reliant on its ‘retro styles’, as it calls them, headlined by pieces such as the Navitimer (in constant production since the 1950s) and the Chronomat, an icon of the 1980s and 1990s (worn by Jerry Seinfeld) now doing good numbers for the company. Arguably, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet paved the way here, the latter by recycling its lodestar Royal Oak again and again, constantly proved right in its hunch that the original luxury steel sports watch, penned by the great Gerald Genta in 1972, was a perennial winner.

Patek continues to rely on its back catalogue, too, most recently introducing the Ref 5172G chronograph, a watch that, with its syringe hands, bicompax dial and opaline rose-gilded dial, looks at first glance as if it should be the subject of bids in an Old-Masters-themed auction.

Rolex? Rolex is the nonpareil here. Wags quip that the green and gold superbrand only has one watch, reference to the fact its models are all basically the same shape, one it’s been peddling for generations. After all, despite the general list of Western contemporary mores, it’s perfectly possible that, if something was good once, it might still be good now. As Pierre Cardin reflected in later life: ‘My old vintage designs are so popular now. I must have been on to something.’ This year’s new Rolex Air-King, for example, is a borderline facsimile of the model it replaced. And the one before that, and so on. I hear no complaints.

Commercially, it seems, the persistent return to designs of yesteryear makes sense, but it’s tricky to determine what it is that keeps us coming back for more of the same, again and again. Novelty and innovation, we’re told, are the lifeblood of any business and watchmaking wouldn’t be afraid to say the same. There are countless brands, many of them small-scale independents, reinventing the horological wheel with convention-busting forms and bewildering mechanical movements, yet the large-scale luxury watch companies prefer to employ visual signposts to the past. Signs of innovation are likely to be tucked away in the small print explaining the materials and manufacturing techniques employed to ensure your new watch is up to the scrutiny of daily wear, not exposed in the designs.

Why? It’s only a theory, but my take is that the real lifeblood of the luxury-watch industry, the fuel that turbocharges it, isn’t game-changing evolution, but nostalgia. Nostalgia is the currency that keeps watchmakers solvent — and there’s nothing wrong with that. We only need open our newspapers to understand why a little Kodachrome-flavoured aspiration might be welcome. As John Steinbeck said with searing pathos: ‘In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.’ If I might forgive myself, I imagine a nostalgic bent is also what led me to dispose of the pleasantries during that brief encounter back in the summer. What must life have been like when the fellow made his purchase? The intrigue will never be satisfied and so it remains. For such reasons, the vintage aesthetic isn’t going anywhere. Expect more of the same. This year. Next year. Always.

Five new watches inspired by the original classics

Rolex Air-King

Rolex created its Air-King in 1945 for the British RAF. At 34mm, it was large for the time, hence ‘King’. In the eight decades since, it’s become one of Rolex’s most-loved designs, which might explain why the silhouette of this year’s new model is so strikingly similar to the original. The typography on the dial is lifted straight from a model released in the 1950s with a new specification of 40mm, Oystersteel, £6,150 — rolex.com

Vacheron Constantin 222

Released in 1977 and designed by a young Jorg Hysek, the 222 was named for the years since Vacheron Constantin had been founded. It joined a growing roster of stainless-steel luxury sports watches led by Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak, but was discontinued in 1985 as the infamous Quartz crisis took hold. It only reappeared this year, this time in 37mm of gold. Historiques 222 in yellow gold, £60,500 (020–7578 9500; www.vacheron-constantin.com)

Patek Philippe Ref 5172G

Flick through the pages of any auction catalogue worth its salt and you’ll find Patek wristwatch chronographs dating back to the 1920s. The pure, frankly joyful aesthetic of those standard bearers continues to saturate the brand’s current chronograph collection, witnessed by this year’s white-gold Ref 5172G. £64,760 (01892 534018; www.gcollinsandsons.com)

Breitling Navitimer

Back in the early 1950s, before computerisation, wristwatches still had the power to be hugely effective tools. Breitling’s original Navitimer had a built-in slide rule for making all sorts of navigational calculations from the cockpit, assuming you knew how to use it. This year’s 70th-anniversary collection celebrated the design’s remarkable longevity. Navitimer B01 Chronograph 41 in steel on gold, with brown-alligator leather strap, £7,000 (020–3988 2224; www.breitling.com)

Piaget Polo

Yves G. Piaget knew how to work high society. His 1979 Polo luxury sports watch design was unashamedly aimed at those we now refer to as high-net-worth individuals and was frequently spotted on the wrists of luminaries of the time, including Andy Warhol and Björn Borg. The 2016 revival piece isn’t the spit of the original, but it’s become the brand’s bestseller. Piaget Polo Green Date, £25,300 (020–3364 0800; www.piaget.com)

Patek Philippe and G. Collins & Sons make the perfect match. Patek Philippe craft exquisite timepieces, to be treasured and worn everyday, then passed down the generations, and G. Collins & Sons is like-minded — a family run jewellers in Royal Tunbridge Wells, with the business itself handed down from father to son.

They are renowned for class and discretion, whilst the jewellery and watches grace the most discerning of clientele, both locally and beyond. A chosen retail partner of Patek Philippe, G. Collins see this as a true honour, being one of only a handful in the United Kingdom — their proper old-fashioned service sets them apart from the rest.

Here clients are special, and leave feeling part of an extended family. Patek Philippe watches are a cut above, and in this video we delve deeper into their beautiful World Time watch, and tell you more about how it feels to wear and own one of these one-off masterpieces.

Find out more at www.gcollinsandsons.com/patek-philippe

Tag Heuer Connected

Known as one of the leading luxury Swiss watch brands, Tag Heuer are proving that they can also master the smartwatch, with the 'Connected' range. Made in the same classic style as their other watches, the Connected features a touch screen, monitoring sensors and scratch-resistant sapphire crystal. £1,650 from goldsmiths.co.uk

Withings Scan Watch

Almost like having a doctor on your wrist — the Withings Scan Watch not only tracks your workout, but also monitors your heart health, sleep and respiratory functions. Long gone are the days when watches would only tell the time, this option from Withings features a medical grade ECG and an oximeter for SPO2 recordings. It also had a battery life of 30 days, but that seems pretty irrelevant compared to the rest. £208.29 from www.withings.com

Mobvoi TicWatch C2+

Made with leather straps and available in three chic colours, the TicWatch c2+ from Mobvoi has won several design awards thanks to its classy yet simple style. With features like Google Pay, built in GPS and fitness tracking, you really can leave home without your phone and wallet. £142.49 from www.mobvoi.com

Garmin Lily Classic Smartwatch

A big name in the GPS world, Garmin also offers a range of smart watches. With a touchscreen design and a simple style, the Lily Classic allows you to send messages, track your steps, sleep and energy levels. £179.99 from www.buy.garmin.com

Hybrid Smartwatch HR Monroe Black Leather

A beautiful, classic watch from Fossil that not only looks elegant and timeless, but also lets you control your music and tracks your activity during a workout. £189 from www.fossil.com

Mondaine Watch Helvetica No.1 Regular Smartwatch

This unassuming watch from Mondaine is delightfully simple, yet can be connected to your smartphone to display emails and messages, monitor your sleep patterns and track activity. With a simple steel case on a leather strap and a clean white face, this is a great go-to option for any outfit or lifestyle. £450 from www.jurawatches.co.uk

Hybrid Smartwatch HR- Jorn 42mm Brown Leather

Simple, elegant and wholly Scandinavian in its aesthetic, the Hybrid Smartwatch from Skagen is composed of a leather strap (with other options available) and a minimalist face design. The watch allows you to track all your vitals, as well as link as an alarm clock, and display messages, social media notifications and emails.

£189 from www.skagen.com

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gentleThey may be very different in scale, but watches and cars both rely on precision engineering — and thus it’s not too surprising to discover that Edouard Heuer and Ferdinand Porsche have a fair amount in common. Heuer was a pioneer of designing and manufacturing chronographs — that is to say, watches with built-in stopwatch functions — while Porsche’s eponymous car company has been a force in motorsport for decades.

Now, the two firms which still bear their founders’ names have come together in a partnership, launching a new timepiece as their first joint venture: the £4,850 TAG Heuer Carrera Porsche Chronograph.

Heuer has been involved in motorsport for many years, and had been making dashboard chronographs for cars, boats and planes since the early years of the 20^th century. Edouard Heuer’s great grandson, Jack, led his family‘s company for decades, with the first Heuer Carrera (meaning ‘race’) chronograph being created in 1963 — designed to let drivers tell the time at a glance in the heat of the action.

Porsche have also used the ‘Carrera’ name for decades. One of the company’s racing cars claimed victory in the 1954 Carrera Panamericana — a hair-raising race held at the time on public roads in Mexico — leading the manufacturer to produce a commemorative ‘Carrera’ edition of its 356 model. Ever since then, Porsche’s most powerful cars have always worn the ‘Carrera’ badge.

Given that a Carrera has been associated with TAG Heuer and Porsche for so many decades, it must have been the obvious choice for the first product the teams have created together. This company describe the new chronograph watch as one that ‘fuses both the Porsche and TAG Heuer aesthetic’, with Porsche’s engraved inscription on the bezel and instantly recognisable font for the indexes.

The red black and grey of the design are Porsche colours, which also hark back to vintage Heuer models, while it’s available with a leather strap or a bracelet. There’s a cool, sporty look to the watch which lends itself perfectly to professional and amateur driving, as well as day-to-day life. And there’s even a special little touch at the back: the TAG Heur transparent back through which you can see the mechanism has been re-designed to incorporate a Porsche steering wheel.

‘TAG Heuer and Porsche have common history and values, of course, but more importantly, we share an attitude,’ says TAG Heuer CEO Frédéric Arnault.

‘Like Porsche, we are disruptors at heart, always in pursuit of high performance. With this alliance, TAG Heuer and Porsche finally come together officially after decades of close encounters and will create unmatched experiences and products for customers and fans that are passionate about both our brands and what we stand for.’

The TAG Heuer Carrera Porsche Chronograph starts at £4,850 for a leather strap model, and £5,000 with a metal bracelet — see more at tagheuer.com

Cashmere that cares

You might think that our Utterly Inessential blog isn't entirely blameless in the whole 'disposable fashion' culture thing. Possibly you'd have a point, but we do at least try to point people in the direction of quality items that last for years — and today, we're going one better by pointing you in the direction of things that have already lasted some time, and can go on to do even greater service. A Yorkshire start-up called the Nearly New Cashmere Co sources used cashmere goodies, repairs and refurbishes them, and moves them on to new owners.

It's eco-friendly, has lots of lovely choice — we found the brilliantly retro Argyll sweater above — and they do a beautiful job of packaging things in cotton bags which makes the whole thing feel very special indeed. What's not to love? TK Prices vary, tops start from around £34

Grab your chance

I apparently have terrible taste in perfume. I'm kidding, I obviously smell delightful, but every time I find a new perfume that I love, it is almost guaranteed to be discontinued within the year. I therefore suggest that you get your hands on a bottle of Cobalt Amber — all natural, with a sophisticated oriental, peppery twist, all very grown up — as soon as you can. VM From £58 from Abel

The 4.9 billion-year-old car key-cum-watch

Okay - there's no getting away from the fact that this one is slightly crazy. A British firm called Senturion has begun making watches out of material from the Gibeon metorits, a rock that was an estimated 4.9 billion years old when it fell to earth — that's about 400 million years older than anything on this planet. And the watch, as well as telling the time (at least we assume it does) doubles as a key for a supercar.

The watch has a big red button 'designed to synchronise with high-performance cars, such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Porsche and Mercedes AMG', the company writes. We suspect that if the watch can be programmed to work with all those cars, it could probably also start up a Ford Fiesta, but let's not go there. Instead, let's just enjoy the bonkers idea of a watch older than planet earth, the shamelessly unreconstructed PR pics, the six-figure price tag and the ability to open your Aston Martin with a big red button on your watch. If that isn't Utterly Inessential in all the best ways, nothing is. TK Senturion watches from around £14,000; SW-M1 model made from the Gibeon meteorite from around £138,000.

Wood you believe it?

If, like mine, your dog has a habit of chasing its food bowl around the room, decorating the kitchen floor (and sometimes even the walls, impressively) en route, then this may well be the answer — a huge chunk of solid oak. Billed as 'a special treat for your special friend', it will, apparently, 'look great in your dog's room'.

Hang on — dogs are meant to have their own rooms? VM Priced from £150 from The Oak & Rope Company

Giddee up while you chow down

My mother is incredibly difficult to buy presents for. Seriously — my sister once bought her a new handbag and her response was: 'But I already have a handbag.' However, being of the horsey persuasion, anything with a nag on it is more or less guaranteed to go down well. I therefore have high hopes for this pair of serving mats by Susan Crawford, one showing the mighty Frankel, the other the holy trinity of Arkle, Red Rum and Desert Orchid. Wish me luck… VM £45 from Clubmatters

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This page is proof of their effort. Some things will make you nod appreciatively. Some will make you raise an eyebrow and shrug. Others will make you narrow your eyes and wonder... why? Welcome, as always, to Utterly Inessential.

Watch this space

Named official watch maker of the Ministry of Defence, it's safe to say that Bremont don't mess around when it comes to equipping the wrists of the nation. Their new range is the boy scouts of watches: prepared for absolutely anything, from cocktails to the cockpit. With chronograph functionality, this watch is specifically aimed at the airman, or anyone for whom perfect timing is a way of life and an absolute necessity. 

The back of this particular watch is engraved with Her Majesty’s Armed Forces Heraldic Badges – something so cool that it's probably best it's not for show to the rest of the world (we all need our own little secrets). Described as 'accurate, durable and legible', I'm beginning to wonder why I keep checking my phone for the time.

The Bremont Arrow (RAF) for £3,595 from www.bremont.com.

My kingdom for a beach...or even a sandpit

I like beachwear an inordinate amount for someone who lives in a) London and b) the UK in general. Whale Of A Time Clothing always keep me lusting after warmer climes full of sun, sand and sailboats and their new California-inspired range truly spikes the volleyball over the net. Eco-friendly and adorably pastel, I would 100% buy one of their deck shirts, despite the fact that I own no deck.

Padstow Deck Shirt in White and Pink, £59.95 from Whale Of A Time Clothing. www.whaleofatimeclothing.com.

Eye eye

I don't personally have a need of binoculars. If perchance you do, you know which ones to purchase.

Ultravid 8x32 HD-Plus Customised Binoculars by Leica, £1,850, www.leicastore-uk.co.uk.

A little sunshine for your little sunshine

I am a firm believer that no one deserves more love and affection than an adorable new puppy. If you even need another reason to purchase this weaved wonder (which contains a blanket, a dog bowl, a toy, dog shampoo and some delicious peanut butter treats) then the name of the toy giraffe is Genevieve. Give Genevieve the Giraffe a home.

Little Sunshine Puppy Gift Basket by Mungo and Maud for £229, mungoandmaud.com.

A grape choice this week

Our resident wine expert Harry Eyres has tipped Portuguese table reds in this week’s issue of Country Life, calling them 'powerful and age-worthy... some of the world's great wine bargains.'

Harry suggests a very reasonable red Somontes Casa da Passarella Colheita 2015/6 at £11 a bottle, but The Spirit of the Inessential demands that you go for the big-hitter, nay the Big Daddy of Portuguese reds, Quinta do Vesuvio 2015. Harry promises that it's fragrant, floral and 'thoroughly seductive.' And if you finish the whole thing I promise you won't even remember the price.

Quinta do Vesuvio 2015 £62.10, www.hedonism.co.uk

If you purchased our entire shopping list this week you will have spent £5,796.05 and all pictures of your new puppy should be immediately sent to the Country Life Facebook page. 

“When one thinks of an heirloom, one of the first objects people think about is a watch,’” says John Reardon, Christie’s International Head of Watches.

“Nothing better represents the passing of time or value from one generation to the next more than a timepiece ,” adds Mr Reardon.

We asked representatives from ten of the world’s finest watchmakers to nominate one piece from their collection that they believe will be worthy to pass down the generations. Here's what they came up with.

Patek Philippe Calatrava

Officers’ watches have been a tradition at Patek Philippe since the early 20th century. The outbreak of the First World War meant that gentlemen needed a more accessible place to keep a watch than in a pocket. The iconic design, heritage and exceptionally skilled manufacture of the Calatrava ensure its status as a wear-forever heirloom. Mark Hearn, managing director

£23,460 – www.patek.com/Calatrava

Rolex Day-Date

In 1956, the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date made its debut. Available only in precious metal, it was the first wristwatch to display the date and day of the week—a technical feat at the time. Rolex’s signature President bracelet was created especially for the Day-Date and is still reserved solely for that particular model. Faye Soteri

£42,300 - www.rolex.com/DayDate

Parmigiani Toric Chronomètre

The Toric Chronomètre pays homage to the design that founded the brand; it’s the result of the wealth of my observations of Nature, math-ematics and architectural geometry. Michel Parmigiani

£15,600 – www.parmigiani.com

Hublot Big Bang

The term ‘Big Bang’ is based on the ‘art of fusion’ concept, where we combine materials that never traditionally appear together, such as gold and rubber, ceramic and steel, denim and diamonds. These surpri-sing combinations required a case that was different to classic three-part models – the Big Bang case has 70 components. Ricardo Guadalupe, CEO

£11,200 – www.hublot.com/en/collection/big-bang

Chopard Happy Sport

The moving diamonds are very much part of Chopard’s DNA. Since launch, we have created many reinterpret-ations, including models with floating fish, stars, animals and more. Caroline Scheufele, artistic director and co-president

£16,800 – www.chopard.com/uk/happy-sport

Breguet Classique Tourbillon Extra-Plat Automatique 5367

Abraham-Louis Breguet is acknowledged as one of the greatest horologists of all time. In 1801, after a long list of inventions, he patented the tourbillon, the device that would cement his fame. Emmanuel Breguet, historian and archivist, general manager

£110,600 – www.breguet.com

OMEGA Speedmaster

The Speedmaster was the first watch worn on the moon in 1969. If you want a watch that will remain special and relevant for generations, I would say that the ‘Moonwatch’ is definitely it. Raynald Aeschlimann, president and CEO

£4,160 – www.omegawatches.com/watches/speedmaster

Bremont MBII

In 2009, we were approached by British ejector-seat manufacturer Martin Baker to produce a watch to celebrate the lives that they had saved. With a special red barrel, the MBI is only available to those who have been ejected. It was subject to two years of testing to ensure it could survive the ejector seat. Nick English, co-founder

£3,795 – www.bremont.com

Cartier Tank

The shape embodies the watch’s pioneering personality—to be a square watch in a time of round watches was revolutionary. I bel-ieve it’s the most important design in the history of watches; its innovation lies within its simplicity. Pierre Rainero, style director

£12,100 – www.cartier.co.uk

Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso Tribute Duo

There’s a natural synergy between Casa Fagliano, the polo-boot manufacturer and the Reverso, which was originally created in 1931 for British Army officers in India to protect their watches when playing polo. The combination of the hand-stitched leather strap and the geometric simplicity of the dial is understated and timeless. Geoffroy Lefebvre, deputy CEO

£19,200 – www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/UK/Reverso

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When I was 14, I enrolled in the Combined Cadet Force at school. I have a distinct memory of going to the stores to sign my two-year contract and pick up my kit, issued by a sandpaper-tongued Geordie sergeant major. On the pile were a green beret, two uniforms and a pair of heavily worn black boots. I had size 13 feet and it appeared the British Army had just one pair in that size, handed down from one village idiot to the next.

To my chagrin, I wasn’t issued with a watch. I’d developed an early liking for wristwatches and had about 20 by the time I learnt to stand to attention in the school quad, shouted at by a fifth-former with a stripe on his arm. Casios, Swatches, stuff I’d saved cereal-box tokens for – that kind of thing.

Perhaps because of this, no one ever invited us to ‘synchronise watches’, which I’d expected to be a central element of the military experience. However, as we were never called upon to advance under artillery barrage, perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Still, to a pubescent boy, military watches carried a certain allure and masculinity. Made for the archetypal ‘real’ man, they were designed to keep a chap safe.

Historians point out that wristwatches were military timepieces before they were anything at all – at least for men. Although early timekeepers were developed for aviators and racecar drivers, what propelled them from pocket to wrist was the First World War.

Officers soldered wire loop lugs to their pocket watches and mounted them on their wrists, a much more convenient place for coordinating going over the top.

The look stuck, but it wasn’t until the Second World War that they became universal. Heroic pilots returning with their bomber jackets and standard-issue wristwatches did wonders for what were once seen as little more than bracelets.

Towards the end of that war, the British Army, recognising the need for robust pieces that could cope with mid-20th-century warfare, commissioned 12 companies, including Omega, IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre, to produce the first military-spec watches.

These had to be waterproof, luminous, highly accurate and built around sturdy steel cases. They were delivered in 1945 and became known as the Dirty Dozen, a series that has become increasingly collectible as the trend for smaller watches (the largest of the dozen is the Longines at 37.5mm) has returned. Each carried a case-back engraving of W.W.W. (Wrist. Watch. Waterproof.) and the broad arrow symbol on the dial, showing they were property of the Crown.

Some 145,000 of these were made, although not in equal numbers. Omega made 25,000 and little-known Grana is thought to have made fewer than 1,500. According to Toby Sutton of auction house Watches of Knightsbridge, a Grana today will fetch as much as £6,000, the Omega less than £2,000 and the Vertex, Cyma and Timor models about £500–£700. Collectors with all 12 are few and far between.

“You can bash them about a bit and, bar the odd scuff, they won’t betray you”

In the decades since, military watches have mirrored advances in military technology. In 1953, Rolex introduced the Submariner, the world’s first water-resistant watch to 100m. The civilian versions were hardy enough, more so those modified military-spec ‘MilSub’ pieces, such as those issued to the Royal Navy in the 1970s.

These had luminescent tritium dials, indicated by a circled ‘T’ on the dial, and are very collectible – Bonhams sold one for more than £120,000 a couple of years ago.

Tudor, sister brand to Rolex, had its own Submariner line and supplied standard-spec watches to the US Navy and the Marine nationale française. The 1954 original was recently revived as the Heritage Black Bay, helping to revitalise the brand’s fortunes.

In 1952, Breitling announced the Navitimer, with a circular slide rule that could deliver useful insights to flight crews, such as distance travelled, average speed and fuel economy. Many military pilots still wear a Navitimer and 65 years after its debut, it has been in constant production longer than any other Swiss Made mechanical chronograph.

Today’s military pieces make superb everyday wristwatches. They often have hardened cases (such as those by Bremont), water-resistance of at least 100m, shock-resistant movements set in rubberised mounts or scratch-resistant sapphire crystals ‘secured against displacement by sudden drops in pressure’, to quote IWC’s description of its latest Pilot’s Watch, the MkXVIII, a 1940s revival. In other words, you can bash them about a bit and, bar the odd scuff, they won’t betray you.

A simple, legible watch with a steel case, a black dial and a textile strap has rarely been more fashionable than it is now. Prices of the original Dirty Dozen have, according to Mr Sutton, doubled in the past couple of years. Forty years after its closure, Vertex – one of the original 12 brands – was even re-launched in 2016 by the great-grandson of the company founder.

My good fortune is to be of a generation permitted to enjoy a military watch without needing to partner it with a beaten-up pair of army boots. I’ve no doubt my sergeant major would disapprove, but I can live with that.

Credit: Alamy

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