| WATCH YOUR TIME
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© LUC BRAQUET
T E C H
TIFFANY & CO. Bird on a Flying Tourbillon
Azure Blossom. A high jewellery piece pow-
ered by a bespoke high-watchmaking cali-
bre: a manually-wound tourbillon movement
created by the Swiss manufacture Artime for
Tiffany & Co. The regulator, covered by a sap-
phire glass dome faceted like a diamond, serves
as the perch for a cockatoo set with 70 diamonds.
The dial itself boasts 168 diamonds, with lac-
quered flowers arranged on two levels above
a champlevé enamel background, all set within
a 36 mm white gold case adorned with 341 dia-
monds. Adding the 143 stones set into the visible
movement through the sapphire caseback and
the 49 diamonds on the buckle, the total comes
to 771 diamonds (over 3.8 carats), not includ-
ing the single diamond solitaire on the crown.
Limited edition of 10 pieces.
he idea of stripping away the dial and paring back the movement plates
and bridges to the minimum has, like anything in watchmaking, been
around for years, and is usually attributed to André-Charles Caron, the
father-in-law of the far more famous Jean-Antoine Lépine as a way of promot-
ing the younger man’s revolutionary single-plate movement design – stripping
back the dial allowed potential customers to see the precision and quality of the
movement. But with most watches of the time having easily accessible move-
ments, the idea didn’t catch on and only found wider favour two centuries later,
though you can find the odd example popping up in the interim almost always
as a way of showing off something new – Patek Philippe for example.
The revival was a reaction to the quartz crisis, an act of defiance in the early
1980s from makers such as Audemars Piguet and Blancpain that wanted to
demonstrate the beauty and intrigue that quartz technology could not offer,
but, even at the time they were thought of as a bit naff; a whimsical tributary
to the watch design mainstream with, ironically enough, too much detail. The
baroque aesthetic of an elaborately engraved bridge was too far removed from
the minimalist current that dominated 1980s watch design — compare a 1985
Audemars Piguet skeleton with the Braun AW10 from the same period.
→
While skeleton watches are nothing
new, since the turn of the millennium,
brands have found novel ways to make
mechanisms the centre of attention.
By James Gurney
TECH
All is revealed
“Chance exists no more in art than in mechanics”
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)