"Watch & Act!" Auction Item – Lot 16: It's a Rado Ashleigh Barty party and you're invited
World women’s number one tennis player Ash Barty has collaborated with Rado to release a watch this year, bringing us the Rado HyperChrome Ashleigh Barty Limited Edition, a white-hot polished ceramic watch that matches perfectly with the uniform of Wimbledon, which was her first junior Grand Slam win – ahead of her career-defining Grand Slam win at the French Open in 2019. Taking advantage of Rado’s expertise in ceramics, both the case and bracelet of the watch have been produced in a polished white ceramic, with the case reinforced with stainless steel. The bracelet is finished with a deployant clasp for a snug fit, and tapers nicely into the 36mm case. The gleaming case is where the watch really shines. The bezel is fitted with 60 diamonds around the circumference of the dial, which not only draws the eye inward but could also be used as minute markers. Once your eye has been drawn into the dial, you’re treated with the soft pearlescent glow of the mother-of-pearl dial, which has been radially spoked for emphasis and is only punctuated with a white date indicator. As a final touching nod to the career success that Ash Barty has had at such…
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OK, let’s dispense with any hype and get down to it. Sixty per cent of watches are sold on a bracelet and this is a fact that Hublot are finally set to take advantage of with the Hublot Big Bang Integral, a new collection, freshly launched at the LVMH fair in Dubai in early January. But first, if we’ve set a tone of #realtalk, let’s address a glaring contradiction. Doesn’t the very concept of a Hublot Big Bang with a metal bracelet jar with the original vision for the Big Bang? Which was to demonstrate the ‘Art of Fusion’ by attaching a rubber strap to a precious-metal case? A quarter of a century later, the model has grown into such an entity in its own right that it can now evolve without letting the original concept down in any way, opening the way for the Hublot Big Bang Integral. A Hublot Big Bang with a metal bracelet was always going to happen, regardless of the popularity of the original version. However the reason for the long wait (this single component has taken no less than three years of exhaustive research and development) is telling. Because it couldn’t just be any…
Most of you reading this will have already heard of Gary Getz, or, as he goes by on his Instagram nom de guerre, GaryG (@garyg_1). But if for some reason you haven’t stumbled across his ‘gram page or heard of him at a horological gathering, believe me when I say, the man hath some nice watches. In fact, it’s probably easier to think of Getz’s collection of timepieces as an assortment of some of the most revered and sought-after grail watches on the planet. A judge at last year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, and a regular columnist for Quill & Pad, Getz recently wrote about his experience of purchasing and taking possession of one of 2019’s most talked about and contentious timepieces — the A. Lange & Söhne Odysseus. To say that Getz has performed a deep dive on Lange’s first steel sports watch is perhaps a bit of an understatement, and he’s accompanied his words with myriad excellent photos chronicling the process of unboxing, adjusting links and wearing the steely timepiece. It’s a great read, and if you’re still on the fence about the Germanic integrated sports watch, this article goes a fair way to answering questions and…
It’s Thursday, and that can mean only one thing — it’s time for Nicholas Kenyon & James Robinson to engage in another jousting of words over a watch-related point of contention. In this week’s office argument, the two pontificate whether or not it’s OK to wear dive watches on leather straps. James Robinson – The For Argument I don’t think there can really be any debate on this matter — dive watches look great on leather bands … and that’s the end of it. The argument that “they shouldn’t be worn on leather because that defeats the purpose of them” is completely redundant. I guarantee you that 99.9 per cent of dive watch owners around the globe have never, ever used their fit-for-purpose tool watch in its intended environment. That’s why innumerable different examples of amphibious timepieces these days are sold on leather bands directly from the watchmaker, because they know, just as well as I, that dive watches are, more than anything else, just an aesthetic. People just like the way they look, and that’s completely fine, and if someone wants to pair their 5513 with a tan brown leather band, who among us has the authority to tell them otherwise?…