Time Watch

View from the Floor – BaselWorld and SIHH

The BaselWorld and SIHH shows were busier than ever, with both cities, Basel and Geneva, bursting at the seams with companies showing their product. It was hard narrowing down just a few companies to report on given all the great new watches featured at the spring shows, but some of them are included here.

>> Keith W. Strandberg, Watch Editor

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Cartier
This year, Cartier boldly introduced a new watch, Ballon Bleu. In development for almost three years, it responds to Cartier’s desire for a classical round piece. A big departure, design-wise, the Ballon Bleu is a “clean sheet” product, designed in-house from the ground up. Usually, Cartier products draw some inspiration from the archives, but not in this case (the other watch with a similar design path was the Roadster). Cartier chose a cartoon theme to introduce Ballon Bleu, asking some of the world’s greatest cartoon artists to create exclusive comic book art for the brand.

In Cartier’s D’Art line, the inspiration this year came from Beijing’s Forbidden City and its dragons. Cartier also introduced the Rotonde de Cartier in the Collection Privée Cartier Paris, the most complicated watch ever made by the brand. Limited to ten pieces in platinum, this watch features a tourbillon, eight-day power reserve, perpetual calendar, and single-push chronograph.

Van Cleef & Arpels
With its Secret, Four Seasons, and Lady Arpels, Van Cleef & Arpels is firmly established as one of the leading brands producing high-end, elegant watches for women. This year, they went a step further with the Lady Arpels Féerie, or Fairy in English, a new bi-retrograde watch whose magic wand indicates the hours and whose wing shows the minutes. Van Cleef also introduced new versions of the Lady Arpels Seasons Collection, with dancing ballerinas and another version with fairies that does one full rotation in a year. This year the brand also introduced a totally new watch line, the Lady Arpels Papillon, which features one of its icons on the dial. The butterfly evokes a happy and carefree Nature.

Girard-Perregaux
Girard-Perregaux sponsors the most serious challenger to Alinghi, the BMW Oracle Racing Team. This year, the brand launched a series of yachting themed watches, presented as BMW Oracle G-P watches. The collection is made up of the Laureato Regatta Tourbillon chronograph with a countdown mechanism, several versions of the Laureato USA 98, and the Laureato USA 98 Lady.

Probably the most spectacular watch of the shows was the Girard-Perregaux Vintage 1945 Jackpot Tourbillon, featuring a functioning slot machine, with a lever on the right side of the case. On the dial, a window at 12 o’clock reveals a row of three symbols, set on three reels. When the handle is pulled, the reels spin and then stop randomly on one of the possible five symbols on each reel, while a hammer strikes a gong, chiming like a real slot machine. Out of the 125 combinations, only one represents the jackpot—three bells in a row. The Wynn Resorts have already stepped up as the exclusive retailers in the USA for the Jackpot, which retails for $563,750.

There you have it, my selection of the brands that made the biggest impressions at the Swiss shows. Now, let’s see how they do in the stores.

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