Jack Forster

POSTS BY Jack Forster

THE THIN MAN: THE VACHERON CONSTANTIN PATRIMONY CONTEMPORAINE COLLECTION EXCELLENCE PLATINE

As regular Haute Time readers know, extra thin watches have a big place in our hearts, and in the small world of ultra slim timepieces there are few bigger names than the oldest in the business, Vacheron Constantin. Extra flat watches have been a speciality of the firm’s for, quite literally, centuries. At the time of its founding in 1755 pocket watches were quite thick (thanks to the type of watch regulating mechanism –technically known as a verge escapement –in widespread use at the time) but men of fashion, especially in France, wanted timepieces that wouldn’t bulk uncomfortably big in READ MORE

MAGIC HANDS: THE PARMIGIANI FLEURIER TORIC OVAL WATCH WITH TELESCOPING HANDS

Parmigiani Fleurier is on every watch lover’s radar in a big way right now, thanks to an unprecedented exhibition it’s brought to the United States for the first time in history. The collection is the Maurice Sandoz Collection of clocks, watches, and mechanical automata, which was assembled by the son of the founder of Sandoz Laboratories. Maurice Yves Sandoz had a passion for mechanical clocks and watches and automata –miniature mechanical robots –that resulted in his accumulating, over the course of his lifetime, artistic and mechanical wonders created by some of the most brilliant and creative practitioners of the mechanical READ MORE

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: THE UTTERLY UNEXPECTED WATCHMAKING OF OCHS UND JUNIOR

Once upon a time, there was a mad scientist named Ludwig Oechslin who was discovered by a mad entrepreneur named Rolf Schnyder. Schnyder and Oeschlin worked together at Schyder’s company, Ulysse Nardin, on some of the world’s most unusual and amazingly different watches, including the Ulysse Nardin Freak (still the benchmark for out-of-the-box design thinking in modern watchmaking) as well as a series of fantastic astronomical complications that could do things like show the position of the moon and planets, predict eclipses, and the slow yearly cycle of the Earth’s tilt on its axis. Sometime during all this Oechslin managed READ MORE

Whirlwind World Tour: The GMT from Greubel Forsey

To a watch connoisseur, the name Greubel Forsey (well, names, actually –Stephen Forsey and Robert Greubel, the two founders, met while both were working at Audemars Piguet’s high complications lab, Renaud & Papi) has thus far meant one thing: the fanatically single minded pursuit of one of the most quixotic goals in horology. That goal is the refinement of a complication invented two hundred years ago by A. L. Breguet, and which was intended to improve human mastery of time: the complication known as the tourbillon. The tourbillon takes the components of a watch most critical to accuracy and places READ MORE

LOVELY BONES: THE PIAGET ALTIPLANO SKELETON ULTRA THIN ESSENTIALS

The extra flat watch is enjoying something of a comeback this year, driven both by the explosion of a market that prefers thin, classically styled watches –China, we’re looking at you –and by a growing appreciation for watches that embody some of the classical expertise in watchmaking connoisseurs have always craved and that a wider audience is finally starting to appreciate. The biggest name in making the thinnest watches is undoubtedly Piaget, whose legendary extra flat movements of the 1950s and ’60s set records and put super-flat dress watches on the wrists of celebrities, jet-setters, and the super-rich (one of READ MORE

FORTY AND FABULOUS: THE OPENWORKED EXTRA THIN ROYAL OAK LIMITED EDITION

The word “iconic” gets tossed around a lot these days (especially in the watch world) so it’s always great to find a watch that really merits the epithet. The Royal Oak was, when it was introduced in 1972, a glove thrown down to the entire watch industry: a stainless steel watch, finished as lavishly as if it were platinum or white gold, with a groundbreaking design that totally integrated the watch case and bracelet, and a signature octagonal bezel modeled after a ship’s porthole that echoed the watch’s proud nautical name. It was a bold but risky move for Audemars READ MORE