Point/Counterpoint Five Watches That Show The Financial Crisis Actually Didn't Kill Creativity

One thing kept nagging at me: 2008 was a long time ago – 13 years, in fact, and while I still think that it's absolutely true that the ongoing effects of the crisis on watch design are very much with us, I also think it's worth conceding that it's not as if innovation in horology has vanished off the face of the earth. Both from a design standpoint, and from a technical perspective, we've seen major innovations, some of which are arguably more important than anything that came before the financial crisis actually hit.

The following five watches present solid evidence that just because vintage, classic, and retro are going strong, doesn't mean the science and art of watchmaking has lost its ability to innovate.

The Aqua Terra >15,000 Gauss is, as they say, just what it says on the tin: A watch capable of resisting magnetic fields so powerful, you generally don't find them outside of research labs or medical imaging centers. Such an achievement is really unprecedented – we've gotten more or less used to it today but in 2013, it was probably one of the two or three biggest stories of the year, at least in technical watchmaking. And since then, it has spawned a whole new certification system (METAS, which certifies a watch both for chronometry and resistance to magnetism) and was also the first step in Omega's shifting nearly its entire watch production over to the same standard. Progress? I'd say so.

In January of 2019, at the last edition of the SIHH, a group of watch journalists were invited to Vacheron's factory in Plan-les-Ouates, on the outskirts of Geneva. There we saw something genuinely original and ingenious: The Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Twin-Beat Perpetual Calendar, with two escapements, one running at 5Hz, and one running at 1.2Hz. The 5Hz balance beats during normal use, but switch the watch into standby mode and it will run for 65 days. This is a solution to a common problem with perpetual calendars, which is that if they're allowed to run down, all the calendar indications have to be reset. While it's certainly a lot more complicated than just using a winder (and more expensive, $199,000 at launch) it's still a fascinating and fresh take on a centuries-old horological problem.

If someone had said to me, in 2008, "Hey, I'll bet you a steel Patek 5711 that by 2021, Bulgari will have broken just about every record you can break in ultra-thin watchmaking," I would have gleefully taken them up on it. And how wrong I would have been. The first Octo Finissimo watch was introduced six years after the financial crisis – in 2014 – and it's a source of never-ending fascination to me that they feel as if they have been around for quite a lot longer than that. 

Just from a design standpoint, they've become as iconic for Bulgari as the Nautilus is for Patek or the Royal Oak for AP, and repeating the list of records broken makes you sound like a broken record: Tourbillon, perpetual calendar, chronograph, minute repeater, you name it. The fact that Bulgari doesn't have a slew of 20th century vintage models to which it must bow, doesn't hurt, but the fact that it has single-handedly created both a cornucopia of technical triumphs and a design that redefined the modern watch landscape, is a pretty strong rebuttal to the idea that the entire industry is stuck in a rut.

In 2013, Jacob & Co. introduced a watch at Baselworld that produced more buzz than an entire apiary of angry bees: The Astronomia Tourbillon. The Astronomia Tourbillon is a watch that I don't think anyone else would have even tried to produce even if they'd thought of it – an enormous watch with a four-armed carrier under a giant sapphire dome, with a triple axis tourbillon, miniature Earth, miniature Moon represented by a giant globe of a diamond (with a patented cut, no less) and a dial showing the hours and minutes. The whole thing is gleefully, completely absurd, but it commits so thoroughly to the design vision that it works, and triumphantly well. Getting the whole thing to work was a major technical achievement as well, and proof that the most satisfying watchmaking happens when mechanics and aesthetics are seamlessly integrated. The hyperwatch is dead? Long live the hyperwatch.

Innovation in complications, case materials, and movement materials are all important and all worth noting and praising. The most difficult domain in which to innovate, however, is in what with inadvertent innuendo the Swiss like to call the regulating organ – that is, the escapement. For the last couple of centuries, the only game in town has been the lever (with honorable mentions to the detent escapement and to a lesser extent, the cylinder escapement) and the co-axial, at Omega.

There have, however, been a number of experiments in the last 20 years in making escapements out of flexible silicon that beat at high frequencies and so far, the one to see widest use is from Fréderique Constant, in its Slimline Monolithic Manufacture. It's the most compact version of this type of escapement so far, and the one easiest (so far) to integrate into a more-or-less conventional wristwatch form factor. Will it unseat the lever more broadly? Doubtful, but it's still proof that even at the most fundamental level, active and creative thinking is going on in watchmaking.

These are five examples, but there are many, many more contenders if you're looking for counterexamples. The signal to noise ratio in enthusiast circles can sometimes make it hard to give real innovation and creativity the credit it deserves, but it's out there – other examples include the Krayon Everywhere watch, which is the first sunrise/sunset complication to be usable anywhere in the world; Ming watches, which offer a form factor and often, technical features you won't find elsewhere; the fact that every Rolex is now rated to ±2 seconds per day maximum deviation in rate, and on and on.

Sure, vintage-adjacent watchmaking is a powerful force in modern watch design, and I don't see that changing any time soon. But as the financial crisis continues to fade into the past, I suspect – as some readers pointed out in the comments in the Point/Counterpoint series – that we'll see that as more of a swing of the pendulum rather than a never-changing feature of the watch world.

So maybe Cole was right after all. Probably not – but maybe. 

Headline image, Greubel-Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon GMT, 2019.