Mechanical watches are one of the ultimate luxuries du jour, says Darius Sanai, as he embarks on a visit to IWC, one of the world’s most respected watch manufactures
There are few things that define the meaning of ‘luxury’ more than the mechanical timepiece. Mechanical watches were made technically obsolete by the advances of the late 20th century, yet the top-end mechanical watch market is thriving as it has never done before. And it is a wonderful thing, this ‘irrationality’ (as economists would call it), because it proves that the human race is as much about beauty and the cherishing of preciousness as it is about function. And it also gives men the chance to show off.
When I wanted to visit and write about a watch company, I settled upon IWC, one of the most renowned but also respected of watch manufactures. The International Watch Company’s legend rests on two factors: the brilliance of its engineering – this is the company that supplied pilots’ watches to both the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force in the second world war, and added to its fame by creating engineers’ watches, resistant to magnetic fields.
It is also renowned for the sheer simple elegance of its designs. Where many expensive watches (and all IWC watches are expensive, starting at the price of a top-end laptop computer and ending up at the price of a Ferrari) appear to have been designed by the kind of chap who drives a white convertible, IWCs have a kind of technical, sober beauty. An IWC is for a particular kind of show-off: it is a symbol of stealth wealth, of the triumph of subtlety over ostentatiousness.
IWCs headquarters are in the pretty town of Schaffhausen, on the Rhine in northern Switzerland. Through three sets of security doors, I found myself sitting in a boardroom with Guy Bove, the company’s creative director. Guy explained that much of his work was concerned with updating the company’s iconic ranges, the Pilots’, Portugese, Ingenieur (engineer) and Portofino ranges.
“We try to further our DNA,” Guy told me; “we’re much more into that than reinventing ourselves”. He explained how he makes tiny changes to the fonts used for the numbers on the watch faces to update them; he has also introduced a little playfulness into the ranges. For instance the limited-run Edition St Exupery Pilot’s Watch, with its trademark handwritten ‘A’ (for Antoine) on the dial, has its power reserve display slightly offkilter, to mimic a plane in a banked turn.
However he says he is very wary of making major changes to a watch range: “there are a lot of solutions that look nice but won’t in ten years’ time. We don’t go there. There should be no problem in having a 10-yearold watch: it’s something to talk about.”
Of the current fashion for bold, sometimes brutal-looking high-end watches, he says he sees it continuing for some years, “but then there will be a trend back towards elegance”. IWC has joined the bold design trend in a small way with its Da Vinci range, which was completely redesigned this year in a tonneau-shaped case, and showing off some of the company’s greatest technology, like a perpetual moon phase display, a four-digit year display and a perpetual calendar.
“It’s a pretty modern shape, made in a traditional way, and it’s a vehicle for the launch of our new chronograph movement,” Guy said. “It’s our concept watch family, our talking point, and we decided to go for a tonneau-shaped watch.” Examining one in his hand, I stopped and marvelled at the fact that it is driven entirely by mechanical technology inside the watch case.
Later, I am taken on a tour of the factory. In another practise that would make economists wince, IWC makes virtually every part of its watches itself, down to grinding out the cases out of bars of gold, platinum or steel, and using lasers to cut tiny mechanical parts out of sheets of gold. This is no mere assembly line: this is vertical integration, ownership of the whole industrial process, taken to its extreme.
Sadly, the factory tour and conversation with Guy are not available to most watch enthusiasts, but another strength of IWC is its watch museum, open to the public and completely redesigned this year. In two big rooms you see and hear the history of the technological advance of pocket and wristwatches for over 100 years, and it’s wonderful to be able to see the timepieces themselves.
There’s the Special Pilot’s Watch from the 1930s, antimagnetic and designed to resist massive temperature fluctuations; the Big Pilot’s Watch, designed to be worn over Luftwaffe uniforms in the second world war; the Ingenieur 500,000 A/m of 1990, which could withstand magnetic fields greater than anything any machine could produce; and the astonishing Il Destriero Scafusia, made in very limited numbers to celebrate the company’s 125th anniversary in 2001, which is the most complicated watch ever made. There are many more, too: the IWC museum is a temple to watch engineering.
I emerged, blinking, into a crisp Swiss day, thankful for our love of mechanical complications. For what a boring world it would be without them.
