It’s Day Three of the SIHH watch fair in Geneva, and despite a late dinner with our friends from A. Lange & Söhne and the Lange Owners Club, not to mention even later cocktails on the SIHH party boat on Lake Geneva, your intrepid WatchTime reporter is back at it to chronicle more headliners and highlights from the show. (To get a first look at Lange’s new models from the show, visit Watch-Insider.com.)
We’ve already shown you Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Offshore Grand Complication, the brand’s headliner release for this year, of which, we’ve now learned, only three will be made. At the AP presentation yesterday, new CEO Francois Bennhamias and his team revealed a few more new watches making their debut at SIHH.
One was the Tradition Tourbillon Minute Repeater, a 10-piece limited edition in a white-gold/titanium case (there will also be a rose gold/white gold version), with AP’s manufacture manual-wound caliber 2874. Front and back of the watch are shown below.
This year is the Royal Oak Offshore’s 20th anniversary, and as expected, several new Royal Oak Offshore models made their debut, including two new pieces with black ceramic cases and bezels. The standout was the new ceramic Royal Oak Offshore Diver, which answers the question of how one can create a functional divers’ watch (i.e., one with a unidirectional rotating bezel) in this collection without sacrificing the fixed, octagonal, screwed-down bezel that makes it iconic. AP’s solution was installing a rotating inner bezel, beneath the crystal and underneath the outer bezel, operated by a crown at 11 o’clock.
Among the new models in Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Master collection is its new Master Tourbillon Dualtime, which has been re-engineered with a slightly altered tourbillon carriage and a slightly thinner case. The watch and its manufacture movement, JLC Caliber 978, are below.
On the sports watch side, JLC unveiled a new divers’ chronograph watch called the Deep-Sea Chronograph Cermet. “Cermet,” as you may have surmised, is a material that blends ceramic and metal to achieve a high level of hardness and scratch resistance. The watch will be available widely in the predominantly black version shown below and also in a boutique-only “vintage” version.
