Timepieces

Close reading of individual watches — movements, design languages, and the decisions behind them.

The collection · 111 essays

The Reinvention of Girard-Perregaux After Years of Silence

For a long time, Girard-Perregaux seemed to exist in the watch world like an old manor at the edge of a grand estate:…

There is a certain kind of watch brand that survives because it becomes inevitable. It builds a shape or a movement or a…

There was a time when the name Yema seemed to belong not merely to a watch dial, but to a particular French idea…

There was a time, not very long ago, when saying “Maurice Lacroix” in a room full of watch people produced a particular kind…

There is a particular kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty. It feels loaded. It sits in the room like a held breath,…

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a watch fair before the lights switch on. It isn’t silence, exactly—more a hush…

In the age of instant gratification, mechanical watches have become a kind of deliberate anachronism: tiny engines you wear on your wrist that…

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a watch fair in the first hour of the morning. The vitrines are lit…

It begins, as so many enduring stories do, not with a roar but with a signature. In Geneva in 1755, a young watchmaker…

There’s a particular kind of confidence that doesn’t need to announce itself. You feel it in the way a well-cut jacket sits on…