Monthly Archives: November 2016

A sale that will likely run collectors of replica Patek Phillippe and Rolex up against connoisseurs of watch history, anxious to make the personal acquaintance of a watch that might not set the wider world alight, but does represent one of the most significant staging posts on the journey of the wristwatch from useful, time-only personal effect to heirloom and artwork combined.
In tandem, these qualities describe what’s thus attractive about a complication that, for most watch lovers, constitutes their first “affair”: refinement (speaking to the chorological skill required to make superbly accurate timekeepers) and legibility (recognizing their role as one of the first “tool” replica watches – the category that gave birth to today’s all-conquering sports watch). By selecting a relative handful – 88 in total – to represent Phillips’ first ever chronograph-only auction, it takes place in Geneva next month.
Originally a term used to describe a device capable of recording elapsed time using a pen and ink system – quite literally chrono-graph – with the advent of mass mobilization. By the Fifties, these tool watches entered the mainstream, thanks to accurate and above all reliable movements from a host of watch makers, many of whom sadly wouldn’t survive the quartz crisis of the early Eighties.
Both civil and military, the need to measure often lengthy time-periods accurately gave voice to a number of manufactures anxious to perfect what some might argue is a timepiece’s most useful secondary function.
All cases are in the genuine tool watch’s material of choice: stainless steel. Phillips is showing that its dedicated replica watch department, set up in 2014 by expert auctioneer Aurel Bacs, is nothing if not purist: merely ‘true’ chronographs have been listed (so no lunar calendars known as ‘moon phases’) creeping in.
The result: ask Paul Maudsley, international specialist director of the London watches department at Phllips’ Auction House on Berkeley Sqaure, what constitutes a “collectible” chronograph, and he’ll say a level of refinement and superior legibility.

However, the hand-wound movement does allow for a greater power reserve. In other words, things can go backwards or sideways just as easily as forwards. This is particularly true in the world of replica watches, where the latest object of desire is just as likely to be the reiteration of an old classic (with a twist – naturally) as a technological leap forward.
Most of us like to think that progress is linear. Experience, nevertheless, teaches us that, like crowds of people rushing through an airport. Take IWC’s Portofino Hand-Wound Mono-pusher.It is rather more like Brownian motion – the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid.
And, personally, I find the very action of winding a watch rather soothing, which more than beats the stress of missing your train when you – very occasionally – forget to do so. This may be the first time that replica IWC has presented a single-button chronograph but, traditionally, single pushers were used on pocket replica watches to start, stop and reset. A hand-wound movement is now also a rarity, thanks to the convenience of self-winding – ie, automatic – versions.
Unlike its predecessors, nevertheless, when it comes to its chronograph function, the new Portofino Mono-pusher is the very model of discretion, with the pusher integrated into the crown with merely the most modest of protrusions signaling its presence.
It performed these functions admirably, but was to be overtaken by its double-pusher parvenus thanks to a simple weakness – with merely one button you couldn’t pause your timings. In spite of the discretion, this is no shrinking violet, with a case that measures a substantial 45mm – the size allows it to boast an eight-day power reserve.