The brand sought out athletes to wear watches in real-life test situations and has since equipped some of whom it calls “friends and partners” - including Rafael Nadal in tennis, Bubba Watson in golf and Nafi Thiam, a heptathlete - with pieces made of rugged materials that could keep pace with them. Mille was one of the pioneers in the early 2000s, a leader in creating new case materials such as the then-revolutionary carbon fiber and sapphire because he insisted that a watch should be wearable no matter what the wearer was doing. These advanced materials help the brands achieve their objectives.” Referring to the independent watchmaker Richard Mille, Mr. Boutros said, “He single-handedly inverted the notion of what luxury could be when lightness and shock absorption became this ultimate goal. “It used to be that a luxury watch was defined by how heavy it was because of the gold, but certain brands revolutionized that concept,” said Paul Boutros, head of watches in the Americas for Phillips auction house. The brand said a watch case made from the resulting material would be 2.5 times lighter in weight than ceramic and 13 percent lighter than sheet molding compound carbon. The alloy was engineered from 99.95 percent silica using a sheet molding compound process, which involves layers of materials that are then compressed. Roger Dubuis spent more than a year creating a special method to make its proprietary mineral composite fiber, a pure-white material unveiled in 2020 that was used again recently in the $75,000 limited-edition Excalibur SoHo Edition Monobalancier watch (exclusive to the brand’s new SoHo boutique in New York City). “Brands have a very limited territory of expression - 2- to 2.5-square-inches on the wrist - so one big area of differentiation from the competition, along with aesthetics and movements, is going to be materials.” “Using new materials is, first and foremost, a wonderful laboratory that shows the unstoppable capacity of our industry to reinvent itself endlessly,” said Pascal Ravessoud, external affairs director and watchmaking expert at the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, an industry organization. While still in short supply, and often too pricey for the average wallet, these enhanced substances are making a provocative statement in time. Top brands are continuing to invest millions in the development of cases from forged carbon, industrial sapphire, advanced ceramics and even proprietary gold mixtures that convey designers’ aesthetics and improve durability. A glance at the wrists of watch collectors today tells an interesting story: Steel, titanium and even 18-karat gold watches have moved aside a bit to make room for the continuing emergence of models using alloys and other high-tech materials.
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