Jack Forster

POSTS BY Jack Forster

Haute Time: The New Breguet Classique 5717 “Hora Mundi”

The World Time watch is one of the most useful complications for travelers; but though it’s been around since the 1930s, watchmakers have constantly been working ever since to make it more convenient and easy to use. There have been a bevy of new world time watches in recent months, and one of the most distinguished is from one of the oldest fine watchmaking houses: Breguet, whose founder invented (among other things) the tourbillon, in 1801. The founder’s long gone, but his inventiveness lives on. The Hora Mundi World Time Watch is a thing of both brains and beauty –the READ MORE

Haute Time: Reverso of Fortune–The Jaeger LeCoultre Grand Reverso Ultra Thin Tribute to 1931

Classics are classics for a reason. The Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso watch has been putting the haute in haute horlogerie (high watchmaking) for 80 years. Ironically, though the Reverso is now known as a timepiece that sets the benchmark for elegance in luxury men’s dress watches, it started out as one of the first watches ever designed for a specific sport–polo. The Reverso came about as a result of a request to a wealthy French businessman, watch collector, and polo enthusiast named Cesar de Trey from the members of a polo club in colonial India–back then, watch crystals were made of READ MORE

Rolex Yacht Master ii ( 2 ) | Rolex Complicated Countdown

The Rolex Yacht Master ii ( 2 ) is also the most recently introduced major new model from Rolex, having debuted in 2007 as the second member of the Yacht-Master family. READ MORE

Go Big or Go Home: The Hublot King Power Répétition Minutes Tourbillon Chronograph

There’s supposed to be an old Chinese adage that risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. The problem, of course, is that usually you see only one or the other. Many luxury watch houses are pulling back, going classical, looking for the broadest appeal with the smallest risk. Hublot is not one of them. Led by one of the few CEOs in the buttoned-down world of fine watchmaking to be a household name, the mercurial and fiercely energetic Jean-Claude Biver, (“JCB” to his fans) Hublot has become the powerhouse it is today by making powerfully designed, broad-shouldered READ MORE

Run Silent, Run Deep: The Panerai Luminor 8 Day Bronzo

When metal meets water, bad things can happen–with the metal usually getting the worst of the bargain. Nowadays stainless steels are most often used when the nasty cocktail of salts and natural ability of water to corrode need to be fought; but before there was stainless steel, bronze (a copper-tin alloy) was what kept ships proof against the sea (and even today, ship’s propellers and many underwater fittings are often made of it.) It’s a perfect match for a watch that hearkens back to the earliest days of the first purpose made diver’s watches. Panerai began as an instrument maker READ MORE

Ring in the New: The Audemars Piguet Millenary Minute Repeater

It’s the oldest complication in watchmaking: a timepiece that chimes the time, and the newest one from the world renowned house of Audemars Piguet is as seductive a blend of old school and new wave watchmaking as a (very well-off) connoisseur could wish. Chiming the time is as old as mechanical clocks themselves (the word “clock” is from the Latin for “bell” and the first ones didn’t even have dials) and eventually clocks–and watches–progressed from just chiming the passing hours, to being able to ring the hours, nearest quarter hour, and minutes past the quarter hour on demand (by pushing READ MORE