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The latest goings-on in the world of haute horlogerie, from a back-to-the-future 1970s LED digital to Swatch’s new Mission on Earth range and an actually-futuristic LED analogue
DIODE TO JOY
In the early 1970s, Girard-Perregaux took it upon itself to develop (at huge cost) its own battery-powered movement, the Calibre 350.
Appropriately, the 350 launched aboard a wristwatch that hit ‘Battlestar Galactica’ on the scale of sci-fi cool: a DeLorean in miniature called ‘Casquette’, with push-to-illuminate, sideview LED display (in Cylon-visor red, too power-hungry to be ‘always on’). Now Casquette’s is back, in a second collaboration between Girard-Perregaux and Saint Laurent’s ‘River Droite’ brand-collab imprint.
The Casquette 2.0 Saint Laurent 02 keeps things faithful to the original design, but is now dressed in a tough new suit of silver-grey Grade 5 titanium, as specified by YSL’s creative chief Anthony Vaccarello.
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Available in 200 examples exclusively at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, Saint Laurent Babylone in Paris, and on ysl.com, £5,315
“When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the moon, I cried.” The famous words of NASA’s legendary astronaut, Alan Shepard who in 1961 became the first American to go into space during the Mercury Seven programme, then in 1971 the fifth man to walk on the moon. It’s Shepherd’s unexpectedly romantic reevaluation of our ‘little blue dot’ that Swatch and Omega are now exploring with their latest MoonSwatch collab.
Three new ‘Mission on Earth’ additions (pictured above) to what’s become a cult phenomenon have seen queues snaking out of Swatch boutiques yet again, thanks to MoonSwatch’s playful take on Omega’s NASA-endorsed Speedmaster, in ‘bioceramic’ plastic. ‘Lava’ with red details, ‘Desert’ in matte beige and ‘Polar Lights’ with Aurora Borealis green each reflect earthbound wonders that only space travel could possibly have afforded.
In-store only, £240, swatch.com
ELECTRICITY AND WATER
Long before its famously bulbous diving watches (made for Italian frogmen during WWII), ‘Officine Panerai di Firenze’ had always been a pioneer of luminescence. Guido Panerai’s patented ‘Radiomir’ (literally, ‘radium sights’) of 1915 made his family firm famous throughout the Royal Navy for their glow-in-the-dark torpedo-aiming calculators. By the 1940s, Radiomir became the name for Panerai’s first watches, then by 1965 it was ‘Luminor’, whose watch dials glowed with a paste based on infinitely less-poisonous tritium, rather than radium.
This new model glows with LEDs, not photon-activated chemical compounds. ‘Light-emitting diodes’ that are powered by electricity – but, crucially, electricity that isn’t battery-generated, rather mechanical.
It’s heady stuff, developed ironically enough in cahoots with Switzerland’s biggest luminescent paint supplier. Flick open and push the button at ‘8 o’clock’ on the caseband of the new Submersible Elux LAB-ID, and several miniature LEDs beneath the indices, bezel and even the minutes hand, glow up on demand. No battery, rather four spring barrels wound by the timekeeping movement’s usual ‘automatic’ rotor, packing 30 minutes of ‘juice’ on a full charge.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the result of eight full years of R&D. And surely something Guido would be proud of. Especially since this dynamo principle draws directly from his early, on-deck landing-pad lighting technology, from which ‘Elux’ takes its name.
£76,800, panerai.com
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