MATERIAL WEALTH

While the year in watchmaking promises no new material focus, watch brands may be leaning into certain unsurprising options. We have a few suggestions of our own

- WORDS ASHOK SOMAN

One cannot understand watchmaking today without a firm grasp on history, and reality too.

It is all too easy to go along with watchmaking brands when they brandish carbon fibre cases as if they are the very latest thing. As it happens, this spoils the fact that carbon fibre remains absurdly useful in watchmaking by virtue of its extremely high specific strength rating. More than anything though, empty marketing talk simply ruins the realization that there might be only two Swiss brands making ceramic cases in sand or dessert yellow.

In other words, innovation is not so much the story as rarity is - for the purposes of this extended story then, we will be relegating the very idea of innovation to the sidelines. Now, if you are longtime reader, you might find this odd but bear with us as we meander through yet another of our materials specials. And, for those of you who wonder about the ceramic cases, we might get to an answer, but the idea there is for you to have some fun figuring things out.

As we wrote last year, one of our first deep dives into the materials that make up the watches that we love was in 2016. It was not a regular feature of the magazine until 2019 though, when it anchored the Summer issue. Issue #53 featured the now-discontinued TAG Heuer Autovia Isograph (with the word Isograph on the dial) in bronze and, with this ambiguous start, we were off to the races. The materials special has appeared in every Summer issue since, making this the seventh instalment in an unbroken row. This, of course, is also a bit of history and directly informs the story this issue.