Hello and welcome to The Fourth Wheel’s weekly podcast. This week’s episode is special for two reasons. First, it’s a Watches & Wonders round-up, so it’s longer than usual (although I’ve done my best to talk quickly!) and secondly, as you will have noticed, it’s a video.
Don’t expect this to become the norm just yet. But seeing as this week’s news is entirely concerned with new products, and for once I happen to have a phone full of images, I thought I’d throw a few of them together so you can see what I’m talking about. It’s rough and ready, I know that. There is also a chance I’ll have messed it up in some small but important way, because it was a last-minute decision. But if you liked it, hit that button, leave a comment, share it in your WhatsApp groups and so on.
This run-down of my favourite watches from W&W splits into two groups: updates to existing models and watches that do something more substantially new. It’s a loose division but a useful one; a huge amount of what was shown in Geneva belongs in the first category, but that’s always the case and as I say in the episode, to expect otherwise would be unrealistic.
I missed a couple of watches out by accident: I probably should have mentioned the Bulgari Octo Finissimo 37mm and Girard-Perregaux’s minute repeater. The latter had probably the best hand-finishing on a ‘mainstream’ watch that I saw all week, for what that’s worth. Apart from them, though, I think the list is pretty good. It covers brands big and small, old and young, expensive and relatively affordable. Tudor and Rolex both get a mention, as do IWC, Oris and Bremont, but the brands I dwell on longest are Parmigiani, Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Chopard and Ressence, which probably says something about where the balance of power and influence rests at the moment.
There will be more to say about many of these watches - hopefully some more in-depth reviews, and certainly some more work to be done around what the year’s watches tell us in a larger sense. The industry is obsessed with power reserves, and micro-rotors, and platinum: the latter is probably easiest to understand, given its position at the top of our perception of luxury but relatively low price against gold. But for now, let’s enjoy a good old fashioned list. Some of them boast innovation, others beauty, and some of them just sparked joy. I wonder how many are on your own lists too.
