Issue 205: Has Blancpain Got Its Groove Back?
The Subdial showcase of neo-vintage models is certainly a start. Plus: AstaGuru, the Indian auction house hoping to break into the UK market
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that must apologise for the temporary lack of podcasting. The News Of The Week is on temporary hiatus and will return as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime, I have added a news item into this week’s newsletter, so as well as returning to one of the age’s most anticipated questions, I have a little bulletin on the latest auction house to set up shop in London.
I would love to know your thoughts on Blancpain. This isn’t the first time I’ve ventured my opinions and it won’t be the last, but I am starting to come round. Tim Barber and I talked about Blancpain on The Watch Enquiry last year, too.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Is Blancpain On The Up?
This week, Subdial is hosting a curated exhibition of neo-vintage Blancpain at its clubhouse in London. Sounds about right, doesn’t it - but this is in partnership with Blancpain itself, which makes one hell of a difference.
This doesn’t really need to be a post about the mistakes and missed opportunities that got us to this point. We are all aware of the status quo, which is that Blancpain does not operate at anything like the right level commercially and culturally given the underlying quality. We know that the brand has an almost uniquely bipolar personality, with the Fifty Fathoms and Villeret collections appealing to very different demographics, drawing on very different eras of history and requiring very different retail and marketing strategies.
It is also nothing new to observe that Blancpain’s watches of the 1980s and 1990s are as under-appreciated and undervalued today as they were impressive and brave in their time. Neo-vintage Blancpain is more fashionable than it used to be, but has not exactly taken the auction scene by storm in the way it would need to for perceptions to really change, or for prices to really take off.
What I’m asking is whether things might be changing. That is a lot to put on one small pop-up exhibition, I realise. There has been no drastic overhaul to the current product line-up, no re-brand, no interviews with CEO Marc Hayek that would indicate a new strategy at work or even a willingness to discuss any of the above and consider a new strategy. So you might well think me crazy. But everything starts somewhere; last year’s Grande Double Sonnerie is generally cited as evidence Blancpain is on its way back, but in isolation a highly complicated watch, even one as impressive as that, isn’t doing the job unless the brand around it starts to behave differently. That might sound churlish - really it is a great watch - but there you have it.
I went along to the Subdial exhibition before it opened to the public, and sat down with Blancpain’s historian Jeffrey Kingston. Having had the advantage of already reading Esquire’s interview with him, I was prepared for (and received) some of the same anecdotes, but I won’t repeat them all for you. What I did have is a conversation that finally, after all these years, changed my perception of Blancpain from 1983-1993. I think the exhibition, and the thinking behind it, can communicate that same perception to a wider audience. The billion dollar question, I suppose, is whether it can transform the fortunes of Blancpain today.
Below the paywall I also get into questions of historical accuracy and offer my advice to the brand, should it be interested in hearing it.
