Monday 24 April 2023 11:13 am

From a surprising new Rolex to a Muppet in the month window

Cross the (tastefully appointed) maximum-security threshold of Watches and Wonders and the hierarchy is instantly apparent. There’s Patek Philippe with its parked-up spaceship, conveying its blue-blooded, dyed-in-the-metal pedigree.

And then there are 30-something other Swiss watchmakers all clamouring to make a noise in the revitalised, post-Covid white noise of horological newness.

This is an industry that’s been supercharged by a rush for tangible asset-class investments, not to mention spending power at higher-than-ever echelons of disposable income. So it comes as a surprise – a pleasant one, mind – to find two notoriously staid stalwarts of Switzerland getting in on this purple patch with uncharacteristic… well, uncharacteristic-ness.

Exhibit A: Rolex, the quiet giant of watches, famous for its glacially iterative evolution across an otherwise unshifting oeuvre. Whether it’s a diving watch, mountaineering watch, flying watch, driving watch or just-plain everyday ‘watch watch’, a Rolex will always fit the bill perfectly, if somewhat unimaginatively.

So praise be for the double-take, record-needle scratch that is the 1908: not only the first of the new ‘Perpetual’ collection, named after the year Hans Wilsdorf devised the name ‘Rolex’ while still based in London, but the first dress watch in years to display (rear-side, where the majority of your money and Rolex’s repute resides) the movement.

Calibre 7140 ticks to a precision of –2/+2 seconds a day, whether up a mountain or in a submarine, and now you can watch it do so. While wearing a Rolex that isn’t the Rolex everyone else in the boardroom is wearing.

Meanwhile, exhibit B: Kermit. As in the Muppet, whose beloved amphibian form serves as the ‘1’ for the date display of Oris’s latest ProPilot X.

A fit-for-purpose pilot’s watch encased by titanium, kitted out with the brand’s new in-house-engineered Calibre 400 mechanics, chronometer-certified… with a frog-green dial, a Muppet every month, and on every delegate’s Top 5 list of Watches and Wonders.