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Maurice Lacroix Brightens its Aikon Grand Date 

Maurice Lacroix shakes up one of its all-black models with new, bright colors, transforming the formerly dark Aikon Master Grand Date Black into the new Aikon Master Grand Date Technicolor. The watch, formerly available only in more traditional black (or dark blue) garb, takes on a new, playful guise with the new offering.

Maurice Lacroix is offering the Aikon Master Grand Date Technicolor in four colors, each a limited edition of fifty.

The debuts retain the watch’s primary technical features, namely its large date display, visible balance wheel and the open-worked small seconds display. You might recall that Maurice Lacroix placed a specialized orange version of its Master Grand Date into the 2021 Only Watch charity auction.

But Maurice Lacroix shifts the design’s mood, adding fun to the Aikon Master Grand Date’s technical, in-house design. 

To do this, the watchmaker offers the Aikon Grand Date Technicolor as limited edition series of fifty pieces in each of four bright, metallic colors: yellow, orange, blue and green.

Furthermore, the date display itself is colorful, with the numerals presented the same bright colors as the dials.   

Maurice Lacroix says it was inspired by the success of its 1990s-era Calypso collection, a series of watches bathed in bright colors.

The new 45mm steel watches display time on an off-center dial finished in a criss-cross  ‘Clous de Paris’ pattern, just above the small seconds display. Black facetted hands are coated with a healthy dollop of SuperLuminova and a touch of red enlivens the tip of the small seconds hand. Inside is manufacture caliber ML331.

As with all its Aikon models, the new series features an integrated strap. Maurice Lacroix provides a black rubber strap and a colorful strap to match the dial.

Maurice Lacroix now packages it all its watches with the same material it uses for its eco-friendly Aikon #tide collection. This means the new series is boxed with packaging made of recycled ocean-bound waste bottles. The watchmaker says it takes thirty-four bottles to make each watch box, which means thirty-four fewer bottles polluting the sea.

As noted, Maurice Lacroix is making the Aikon Master Grand Date Technicolor available as a limited edition of fifty pieces in each of four colors. 

Price: $9,650.

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The Watches

Oris Sets Lab-Grown Diamonds into Aquis Date 

Oris sets lab-grown diamonds onto the dial and bezel of its Aquis Date to create the new, stylish Aquis Date Diamonds.

The new Oris Aquis Date Diamonds.

With a rich cherry red sunray dial, the new model is the first watch from Oris with this particular gem setting. The brilliant-cut lab-grown diamonds, indistinguishable from an Earth-mined diamond of equivalent quality, frame and add luster to the already luxurious dial.

 

Oris has utilized the Aquis Date collection in the past to highlight other unusual dial options. You might recall the watchmakers eye-catching Aquis Date Upcycle or its spiffy New York Harbor Limited Edition, each of which offered unusual dials that also signaled the brand’s ongoing attention to environmental awareness.

The 41.5mm steel watch is set with a total of 1.2 carats of diamonds. (See specifications below for more details). Inside you’ll find a Sellita-based Oris Caliber 733 automatic movement protected with an impressive 300-meter water resistance rating. Oris offers either a steel bracelet or a matching cherry red rubber strap.

Price: $5,500. 

Specifications: Oris Aquis Date Diamonds
(Reference no. 01 733 7766 4998-07 4 22 68FC / 8 22 05PEB) 

Case: 41.5mm multi-piece stainless steel, set with 48 Top Wesselton E-G, VS1, brilliant-cut, lab-grown diamonds. The crystal is sapphire, domed on both sides with anti- reflective coating inside while the caseback is stainless steel, screwed, with see-through mineral glass. Water resistant to 300 meters.

Movement: Automatic Oris 733 (Sellita-based) with hours, minutes and central sweep seconds hands, date with quick setting, stop second device, date window at 6 o’clock. Power reserve: 38 hours.

Dial: Sunray cherry red set with 44 Top Wesselton E-G, VS1, brilliant-cut, lab-grown diamonds and Super-LumiNova. Applied indexes.

Strap Multi-piece stainless steel metal bracelet with folding clasp with extension, or cherry red rubber strap with stainless steel security folding clasp. 

Price: $5,500

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The Watches

Diver Drums  

Louis Vuitton adds two new options to its GPHG-award-winning Tambour Street Diver collection.

 

The Louis Vuitton Tambour Street Diver Burning Rock.

Louis Vuitton’s year-long celebration of its bedrock Tambour case in 2022 pays homage to the design’s many variations on the inverted-drum shape, including its much-acclaimed dive models.

With its Diver’s Watch Prize from the 2021 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in mind,  the global fashion brand and watchmaker recently added two new options to its Tambour Street Diver collection.

New within the collection are the orange-accented Tambour Street Diver Burning Rock and the Tambour Street Diver Urban Green. 

The duo borrows hues from Louis Vuitton’s own historical designs, and in one case (the orange model) recalls traditional dive watch coloring devised to ensure easy legibility under water and in darkness.

Both watches are 44mm steel-cased dive-inspired watches with ETA-based automatic calibers and luminescent white hands, numbers and indexes.

The Louis Vuitton Tambour Street Diver Urban Green.

Both offer screw-down crowns to ensure water resistance to 100 meters and each come with a Louis Vuitton-branded interchangeable rubber strap. Price: $7,805.

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Featured News

Watches and Wonders 2023: Montblanc Tells a Story

By Nancy Olson

Storytelling and imagery are important players in communication, creating connection, emotion and, as a result, remembrance.

Watches and Wonders 2023 in Geneva was rife with stories, often told most dramatically by the watch brands’ respective exhibit space. From the fantasy of jewels at Van Cleef & Arpels to A. Lange & Sohne’s Odysseus Chronograph, there was a lot to take in and even more to inspire.

The Montblanc booth at Watches and Wonders 2023 featured an oversized nib as a pendulum.

Walking into the Montblanc booth, for example, was like entering a mountain landscape, where shades of gray, white and wood conjured the primary palette and motif of this year’s watch debuts. The bold imagery also served as a link between the art of writing—Montblanc’s foundation in pens since 1906—time, and the theme of exploration. And owing to the brand’s reputation in handcrafting its pen points, the centerpiece was a dramatic oversize Montblanc nib pendulum, which uninterruptedly drew mountain scenes on a round canvas suggestive of a watch dial.

Each watch in the new Montblanc 1858 Zero Oxygen 8000 Capsule Collection features a Sfumato dark grey Glacier pattern dial, replicating the color of the rock and ice at 8,000 meters.

Montblanc’s Managing Director Watch Division Laurent Lecamp emphasized the importance of imagery and storytelling to share important themes. “Story is the soul of the world of Montblanc,” he explained to me during our recent interview. Thus the company often engages high-profile individuals, fans of the brand, to help recount the narrative.

The back of the Montblanc 1858 Geosphere 0 Oxygen 8000 pictures K2, the world’s second-highest mountain.

Reinhold Messner and Nimsdai Purja, mountaineers and Montblanc “Mark-Makers,” inspired Montblanc’s intricate art-inspired booth space, as well as the new watches in the collection. Even the walls told a tale, incorporating the men’s words taken from their written accounts of climbing expeditions.

The new Montblanc 1858 Geosphere 0 Oxygen The 8000, with MB 29.25 automatic worldtime movement.
This Montblanc 1858 Iced Sea Automatic Date Boutique Edition comes in a 41mm stainless steel case.

Following suit, the 1858 Zero Oxygen The 8000 watch collection on display for the first time revealed colors that recall the rock and ice found at high altitudes, made using zero oxygen technology.

The new Montblanc 1858 Geosphere Chronograph 0 Oxygen The 8000 LE 290 44mm .

All four of the Montblanc 1858 Zero Oxygen 8000 Capsule Collection debuts join Montblanc’s Zero Oxygen series. The collection’s  timepieces boast zero oxygen inside their cases to not only eliminate fogging, but also to prevent oxidization.

The new Montblanc 1858 Unveiled Secret Minerva Monopusher Chronograph LE 88. Inside is a reversed Minerva caliber.

Taking the imagery one step further, the very beautiful and complex Montblanc Unveiled Secret Minerva Monopusher Chronograph, while not specifically among the 8000 Capsule Collection models, nonetheless displays a distressed steel case created partly by tumbling and brushing the metal with quartzite straight from the company’s namesake mountain, Mont Blanc.

 

 

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The Watches

Watches and Wonders 2023: Ulysse Nardin Reboots the Original Freak 

More than two decades after releasing the groundbreaking Freak, Ulysse Nardin introduces the Freak One, a version of the flying carrousel movement watch that revives its three signature characteristics: no dial, no hands and no crown.

The new Ulysse Nardin Freak One.

However, the new watch now benefits from the many technical advances Ulysse Nardin devised during the past twenty years (Note that since 2001, Ulysse Nardin has filed more than twenty patents for the Freak).

Thus, the new Freak One is regulated by a silicon hairspring (which Ulysse Nardin introduced in 2008) and is regulated with an escapement treated with the synthetic diamond and silicon plasma treatment called DIAMonSIL, which Ulysse Nardin added to the Freak in 2007.

A more recent technical flourish, the proprietary automatic Grinder system, means the Freak One is much more easily wound.

The system is twice as efficient as a traditional winding system and contributes to the long seventy-two-hour power reserve of the UN-240 manufacture caliber inside.

Aesthetically, the new Freak One combines several favorite Freak designs from the past. These include the notched bezel of the original 2001 Freak, the open gear train seen on the 2013 Freak Cruiser, plus the high-legibility of the 2018 Freak Vision.

As a sort of tribute watch to its original model, the new Freak One glows with beautifully finished rose gold movement components and a rose gold bezel, all contrasting luxuriously with the 44mm black DLC-coated titanium case.

The lightweight metal plus a newly integrated 30% recycled textured rubber strap (one of three included) combine to make the Freak One quite comfortable on the wrist.  

Price: $68,600. 

Specifications: Ulysse Nardin Freak One

Caliber: UN-240 Manufacture automatic movement, 72-hour power reserve, frequency 3 Hz (21,600 V/H) hours, minutes displayed via flying carrousel movement rotating around its own axis. Silicon oversized oscillator and balance spring DIAMonSIL treatment to escapement, Grinder automatic winding system with blades technology, rose-gold bridges with Super-LumiNova, Black engraved sunray pattern on the barrel cover.

Case: 44mm by 12mm black DLC-coated titanium with satin finish, rose gold 5N bezel, black titanium case back with sapphire insert, water-resistant to 30 meters. 

Bracelets: Black rubber ‘ballistic’ textured strap, black matte alligator leather strap and two-tone rubber strap with black DLC-coated titanium deployant buckle. Rubber straps made of 30% recycled rubber from production waste by BIWI, Switzerland.

Price: $68,600.

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