Architects of Time

The best new watches offer ingenuity for every design lover.

- By Charles Curkin

Before Marie Antoinette lost everything from the neck up, she was enamored with the pocket watches of Abraham-Louis Breguet. In 1783, the French queen commissioned the legendary watchmaker to create what is still considered one of the most complicated timepieces ever made. Imagine a self-winding watch that was at once a perpetual calendar (it displays the full date without needing to adjust for leap year), a stopwatch, a thermometer, and, perhaps most impressively, a minute repeater (press a button to hear lilting chimes sound the hour and minutes). Even by today's standards, it's a marvel of design, and with so many moving parts, it was as complex as the time in which it was made so much so that neither the queen nor Breguet lived to see the final product, as it took more than 40 years to complete. Today, the Reign of Terror might be over, but the decadence and architectural ambition of the era is here still. Watchmakers are innovating, redesigning, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Here, a selection of the year's most j