A great ladies’ watch is all about getting the proportions right and taking extra care with the design details. At Time to Move, the Swatch Group’s 2019 replacement for Baselworld, Breguet showed us the subtle art of creating great ladies’ watches. Martin Green highlights his favorites here.
As the Swatch Group has now left Baselworld – and this appears to be a permanent thing – we discuss the very first Time to Move event consisting of the Swatch Group’s six premium brands Breguet, Blancpain, Jaquet Droz, Glashütte Original, Harry Winston, and Omega. The event comprised almost 200 journalists from 21 countries, which traveled between the brands’ Swiss factories. Jump on the bus for a Swiss (S)watch tour with Elizabeth Doerr and Martin Green.
The watches Breguet has created using the exquisitely rare and beautiful cameo carving technique for its Cammea collection should remain heirlooms for the ages. Elizabeth Doerr explains why.
Early American historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich titled her 2008 book ‘Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.’ Ulrich would probably be very interested to know about three famous Swiss and French brands whose very first wristwatches were made for – and in a way by – women. These watches by Breguet, Hermès, and Patek Philippe have made history.
In 1783, just as the queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was sitting for a portrait, an officer of the queen’s guard visited Abraham-Louis Breguet’s workshop: Queen Marie Antoinette desired a pocket watch containing all known horological complications at the time. It took 44 years to complete and is perhaps the most famous watch in history, as much for its intriguing story as its ingenious mechanics.
Even when you are really good at your craft and universally recognized, you might unwittingly find yourself in the middle of a battle. This is what happened to Abraham-Louis Breguet in the early nineteenth century as the Napoleonic Wars were being waged throughout Europe. For many years these conflicts offered both opportunities and challenges to Breguet. Martin Green explains why.
The Breguet Tradition collection, as exemplified here by the Tradition Automatique Seconde Rétrograde 7097, does just what it says on the label: provide tradition. And it does that very well as Ian Skellern illustrates in a comparison with an original 200-year-old Abraham-Louis Breguet Souscription pocket watch.
The Naked Watchmaker (TNW), aka Peter Speake-Marin, has recently began a series of deconstructions of a broad selection of modern Breguet watches and movements, starting with the Classique 5177, a relatively simple (for Breguet) three-hand dress watch with date. Here Ian shares a few details that The Naked Watchmaker didn’t reveal.
Standing before his eyes was the most perfect of God’s creatures, a wonderful mix of Audrey Hepburn and Penelope Cruz. What Makes Me Tick thought his heart had skipped a beat, and he heard the chimes of every single minute repeater Patek Philippe had ever created – all chiming at exactly the same time! Six months later the gentle creature and he were married. This extraordinary story reflects the marvelous world of vintage watches: finding the rare bird, linking it to a story, and never letting it go.
In 1815, King Louis XVIII appointed a new ‘Horloger de la Marine’: Abraham-Louis Breguet. Martin Green thinks it was somewhat ironic that until then Breguet had never really made marine chronometers. That soon changed.