The Weirdest, Wildest, and Most Wondrous Timepieces From Watches and Wonders
These five styles stood out from the pack. Courtesy
Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire s column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world since March 2020. This week, we re working with the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie as Media Partner of Watches and Wonders Geneva. Visit Watches and Wonders website for news and video panels daily, and keep checking back here for all the updates you need to know about.
By way of a closing word on the week of novelties, innovation, and unabashed luxury from Watches and Wonders, we stop to gawp and point at some of the most ingenious, playful and, occasionally downright mind-bending creations that human ingenuity and skill can conjure. You might not see some of these on the wrist of someone you know ever. But it’s good to know that they’re out there, because the forward momentum of the watch industry depends sometimes on this
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Bulgari is back with another record-breaking feat of watchmaking, this time producing the world’s thinnest perpetual calendar.
The watch is the seventh member of Bulgari’s groundbreaking Octo Finissmo collection to arrive as a class leader, a programme of annual milestones that began in 2014 with the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Manual, which became the world’s thinnest manually wound flying tourbillon watch.
Its Octo Finissimo Perpetual Calendar movement is just 2.75mm thick, despite containing 408 individual components and is housed in a case just 5.8mm deep, with microbead-blasted titanium and a polished and brushed platinum models available.
To achieve such a thin calibre, Bulgari integrated a micro-rotor into the movement itself while adjustments are made via three correctors on the caseband. Bulgari has also managed to build an impressive 60-hour power reserve into the movement, one of the many challenges when developing such thin calibres.
Bulgari
So blasé has Bulgari become about its signature watch scooping up world records that an official commique from the brand lists its achievements under the headline ‘Octo Finissimo World Record Saga’. It is indeed a weighty and impressive tome.
Introduced in 2014 the Octo Finissimo was an unusual watch. It had an integrated bracelet and a minimalist design. It was also super-thin (the only unwieldy thing about it was its name). The Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Manual set a world record for the thinnest hand-wound flying tourbillon movement in the world. Two years later the Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater won a second record for its 3.12mm movement. In 2017 the Octo Finissimo Automatic became the slimmest ultra-thin self-winding watch on the market, with a total thickness of 5.15mm (there are thicker bits of paper). And so it continued. Until recently the Octo Finissimo had amassed six world records for slimness.