It's Complicated

The grand complication is back as some of the biggest names in horology crack the code to making watches both dizzyingly complex and eminently wearable.

- Nicholas Foulkes

FOR A BRAND that is widely seen as one of the most, if not the most, conservative of watchmakers, Patek Philippe (www.patek.com) still manages to shake things up admirably. Take this past spring and summer. After industry “pundits” confidently predicted that Patek Philippe would not be launching anything new this year, the company dropped a limited-edition steel time-and-date watch to celebrate the opening of its new manufacturing building. Then, just before he took his summer break, president Thierry Stern emailed his clients to let them know he was unveiling three more watches, each with a superlative complication: a minute repeater, a split-seconds chronograph and a new version of the perpetual-calendar chrono 5270. And not a Nautilus among them.

The last five years or so have been characterised by a mania for steel sports watches, and over that time prices for Patek Philippe’s Nautilus and Audemars Piguet’s (www. audemarspiguet.com) Royal Oak have completely ignored the forces of gravity. Had Isaac Newton been working today, he would not have come up with his career-defining theory looking at prices of these two classic 1970s integrated case-and-bracelet designs by Gérald Genta. Following this ineluctable rise, steel sports watches have appeared all over the place, even at niche makers. Czapek’s handsome Antarctique and H Moser & Cie’s pleasing Streamliner are just two of the more recent passengers to board the luxury steel-watch bandwagon.