Watches & Wonders Geneva 2024: 22 Exceptional Timepieces

Watches & Wonders 2024, the world's largest international event devoted to fine watches, wrapped up last weekend in Geneva, after a full week in which the Swiss city essentially became a playground for the watch industry and those of us who chronicle it. Once again, the annual event featured new timepieces from an all-star assemblage of more than 50 watch brands, from industry titans to ambitious independents (and that’s not even counting the dozens of brands exhibiting outside the main show, in hotels and other venues throughout Geneva). As in previous years, Teddy and I, along with our ultra-talented photo and video team, attended the event and went hands-on with some of the finest and most intriguing new timepieces unveiled there. Teddy’s impressions of various new releases can be found on our YouTube channel; read on to discover my top 22 highlights from Watches & Wonders in various categories.

Dazzling Dial Artistry

Grand Seiko SLGH021 “Genbi Valley”

The latest nature-derived dial in Grand Seiko’s Evolution 9 collection makes its debut on the new SLGH021 “Genbi Valley” edition, limited to 1,000 pieces and featuring the first instance of the historically inspired Evolution 9 case executed in the company’s “Ever Brilliant Steel,” said to be the most corrosion-resistant alloy of stainless steel in the world. The Genbi Valley that inspires the watch’s bright blue-green dial is a gorge formed by the erosion of large stones by the Iwai River in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture; it is renowned for the natural beauty of its ravines and waterfalls and is designated as a Place of Scenic Beauty and National Monument of Japan. The 40mm case houses the Caliber 9SA5, with a 36,000-vph frequency and a lengthy 80-hour power reserve. The watch is delivered on an "Ever Brilliant Steel” bracelet.

H. Moser & Cie. Pioneer Centre Seconds Concept Citrus Green

Schaffhausen-based indie H. Moser & Cie. has garnered a reputation among in-the-know enthusiasts for the stark simplicity of its designs and the audacious aesthetic boldness of many of its colorful fumé dials. Both specialties are in full view in the Pioneer Centre Seconds Concept Citrus Green, whose radiant lime-green dial might have been the most eye-catching of the entire fair. The “Concept” in the watch’s name denotes the stripped down nature of the dial, which has no markers, no numerals, not even the brand logo: just the Pioneer family’s signature leaf-shaped hands and a central seconds hand, with Super-LumiNova on the hands and inner flange. The stainless steel case measures 42.8mm and comes on a bright blue rubber strap that completes the model’s cheerfully colored ensemble. Inside the case is Moser’s in-house-manufactured Caliber HMC 201, with automatic winding and a three-day power reserve. 

Nomos Tangente 38 Date - 175 Years Watchmaking Glashütte

German affordable-luxury watchmaker Nomos Glashütte made its inaugural appearance at Watches & Wonders in 2024, and its featured collection is all about color — 31 of them, to be exact. Each model in the “Nomos Tangente 38 Date - 175 Years Watchmaking Glashütte” series is a limited edition of 175 pieces, and each of the 31 individual models has its own distinctive colorway. Among the rainbow of choices are the ‘70s-style “Sportbunt,” with a combo of light red main dial, dark red subdial, cream numerals, and turquoise and yellow outer rings; the hot-pink-and-magenta “Chili” edition on a gray textile strap; the forest-green and gray “Schlossgrun,” and the somber “Tiefseegrau,” (“deep sea gray”), matching dark anthracite with cream and dusty pink details. Each model’s stainless steel case measures 37.5mm in diameter and features an exhibition caseback with the watch’s engraved limited-edition number.

Rolex Perpetual 1908

Rolex has unveiled a new version of its Perpetual 1908 dress watch, which debuted last year, in a platinum case and an elegantly executed ice-blue dial with a guilloché rice-grain motif. The delicate, eye-catching geometrical pattern blossoms in the manner of a rosette on the surface of the dial, which also employs another type of hand-applied guilloché, a crimped, filet sauté pattern, for the minute track. Like the gold version that preceded it, the dial hosts distinctly stylish Arabic applied numerals at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock and faceted hands. The finely brushed and polished platinum case measures 39mm in diameter, with a coin-edge bezel and fluted lugs, and contains the self-winding Perpetual Caliber 1704, with a 66-hour power reserve. Also like its predecessor, it comes mounted on a dressy leather strap, here in matte brown with Rolex's double-folding "Dualclasp" in the same platinum as the case.

Materials Mastery

Panerai Submersible Luna Rossa

Panerai’s partnership with the America’s Cup and the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli team, which began in 2019, has yielded several special-edition timepieces as well as the integration of high-tech materials used in the sport of competitive sailing into Panerai’s watchmaking. Panerai incorporates the newest of these nautical-inspired materials, called Ti-Ceramitech, into its latest Submersible QuarantaQuattro Luna Rossa editions, which were unveiled at Panerai’s booth under the shadow of a ceiling-suspended racing boat. Ti-Ceramitech is derived from an Electrolytic Plasma Oxidation process of titanium ceramization (for which Panerai has filed a patent), which gives the surface of the material a particularly dense hardness while also remaining lightweight — 44 percent lighter than steel, to be specific, yet 10 times tougher than traditional ceramic. Panerai’s particular process uses a specific combination of base elements to achieve a distinctive blue coloring, which is echoed on the watch’s strap. The 44mm case, including the ratcheting bezel characteristic of the Submersible model, is forged from Ti-Ceramitech and measures 44mm in diameter. The dial is in either matte-grained white or sunbrushed blue; behind it beats the in-house Panerai Caliber P.900, with automatic winding and a three-day power reserve. 

Montblanc 1858 Geosphere 0 Oxygen Carbo2

Montblanc introduced its “zero oxygen” technology — in which a watch is constructed to be completely devoid of oxygen inside the case and crystal, thus eliminating fogging at high altitudes — in 2022, in a version of its exploration-oriented world-time watch, the Geosphere 1858. This year, the penmaker-turned-watchmaker takes it a step further with a case made of a pioneering material called CARBO2, which is formed from a process that captures carbon dioxide from biogas production and blends it with mineral waste from recycling factories to achieve an ultra-light, ultra-resistant composite material — in this instance, with a graphic, dark-shaded surface. Measuring 43.5mm and combining the CARBO2 case middle and bezel with a titanium caseback, the case has added on-theme visual bonuses: a silhouette of the Mont Blanc in luminous blue on its side and a photorealistic laser print of the mountain on its back. The dial, with the hallmark rotating Northern and Southern Hemisphere globes to track two time zones, features its own crystalline, glacier-pattern textured motif from a process called “gratté-boisé.” Montblanc’s automatic Caliber MB 29.25 beats inside the watch, which is (also on-theme) limited to 1,969 pieces in honor of the year Reinhold Messner ascended the north face of Mont Blanc solo. 

Fresh Faces on Familiar Favorites

Baume & Mercier Clifton Moon Phase

Baume & Mercier’s elegant Clifton collection welcomed its the first moon-phase timepieces equipped with the Swiss brand’s in-house-made Baumatic caliber. The Baume & Mercier Clifton Baumatic Moon Phase Date (Ref. M0A10756 with gradient blue lacquer dial and Ref. M0A10758 with a gradient gray lacquer dial) features the classical round Clifton case, which takes its inspiration from a vintage watch from the 1950s, in steel with an array of polished and brushed finishing and a comfortable diameter of 39mm. The lacquered dials have the series’ hallmark Alpha-shaped hour and minute hands and riveted trapezoid indexes, plus a large semicircular aperture at 6 o’clock dominated by the lunar complication and its accompanying analog date display. Inside the case ticks the Baumatic Caliber BM14-1975 ACI, the latest generation of the self-winding Baumatic movement that emerged in 2018, whose friction-resistant silicon parts help it to achieve a power reserve of 120 hours, or five full days, and a magnetic resistance to 1,500 Gauss.

Oris Aquis Date 

Oris built its 2024 presentation around a subtle but substantial revamp of its flagship Aquis collection, specifically the core Aquis Date and its megapopular offshoot, the Oris Date Upcycle. The next-generation models are designed to be both more wearable and more stylish than its predecessors, with reworked lugs and crown protectors; the former have been given a more sculpted treatment that enables them to better hug the wrist, while the latter elements now taper toward the screw-down crown to better guard against accidental shocks and impacts. The steel bracelets’ brushed center links are now broader and more prominent and their overall form is more tapered; on the 43.5mm models containing Oris’ in-house Caliber 400, it’s also equipped with Oris’s Quick Adjust clasp system, which enables easy loosening or tightening of the fit without removing links. For the dials, Oris created new, polished, shield-shaped applied hour markers and a new set of Alpha-shaped hands, both coated with Super-LumiNova, as well as an entirely new, bespoke typography font. Purists will also appreciate the new date display, with high-contrast numerals on background colors that match the dial.

Raymond Weil Millesime Tricomopax Chronograph

From the “strike while the iron is hot” department: independent Geneva-based Raymond Weil, still basking in the glory of winning last year’s GPHG “Challenge Prize” for its vintage-styled Millesime Small Seconds model, has introduced 11 new references in the Millesime collection at its first-ever appearance at Watches & Wonders. Among the new models are new dial-color options in the existing Small Seconds and Central Seconds 39mm families; a 35mm female-targeted model; a new version with a moon-phase display; and my favorite, a Tricompax Chronograph timepiece offered in two panda-dial iterations, one with a midnight blue dial and white counters, the other with the same-colored subdials on a black dial. Both versions have 39.5mm cases in stainless steel, with pump-style chrono pushers, and the distinctive dial typography and “sector”-oriented design elements that caught the attention of GPHG voters in its original version (you can read my review of that watch, and familiarize yourself with the Millesime’s aesthetic hallmarks, here). Inside the case is the automatic, Sellita-based RW5030 movement, which stores an impressive 56 hours of power. 

Tudor Black Bay 58 GMT

Tudor has added a GMT model to its megapopular Black Bay 58 family, a series of vintage-styled dive watches that emerged from the core Black Bay collection and which has found favor among enthusiasts for its understated 39mm case diameter. The watch is essentially a smaller version of the Black Bay GMT that debuted in 2018, which takes its stylistic cues from Rolex’s iconic GMT-Master and adds brand-hallmark elements like a bicolor GMT bezel in indigo and burgundy. On the Black Bay 58 GMT, this 24-hour day-night bezel has a glossier finish for a more vibrant aesthetic; the dial’s “Snowflake” handset has added layers of Super-LumiNova for legibility, and the movement inside is the automatic Caliber MT5440-U, boasting both a COSC certification as well as a METAS certification as a “Master Chronometer; its power reserve is 65 hours, just shy of the 70 hours offered by the non-GMT-equipped base caliber. The Black Bay 58 GMT comes on either a sporty black rubber strap or the classic Tudor riveted steel bracelet.

Ulysse Nardin Freak S Nomad

“Still freaky but now with a touch of high-horology elegance” is how I described the Ulysse Nardin Freak S Nomad in a post-Watches & Wonders Instagram post, and I’m sticking with the description. The watch, a limited edition of 99 pieces, builds on 2022’s Freak S design, which introduced the first automatic movement with an inclined double oscillator regulated by a differential and also incorporated Ulysse Nardin’s unconditional Grinder winding system. (For a greater understanding of how the Freak works — and how to read the time on it — check out my in-depth article on Ulysse Nardin.) The “Nomad” version uses an “experimental mix” of materials for the 45mm case, including titanium for the middle, anthracite-PVD titanium for the bezel and carbon fiber for the flanks. The rotating hour disk in the Freak S’ spaceship-inspired, flying-carousel time-display system is here enhanced with a diamond guilloché finish, produced entirely by hand, with no electronic or laser guidance, by a single artisan on an 18th-century rose engine. The disk — it can’t really be called a “dial” — is made in one continuous motion, meaning no two are exactly alike; the sand-colored surface, evoking a desert, lends the watch its wayfaring name, Nomad. The dynamic tableau on the front face is courtesy of the in-house movement, Caliber UN-25.

Vacheron Constantin Overseas Self-winding Green

You may have heard that Vacheron Constantin unveiled the new World’s Most Complicated Timepiece at Watches & Wonders this year, an accomplishment deserving of much deeper coverage elsewhere rather than a blurb on this list. On the (slightly) more attainable level, the centuries-old Swiss manufacture rolled out the first models in its sport-luxury Overseas collection with “intense” green dials, notable for their combination of sunburst satin-finished centers and velvet-finished flanges. The new series consists of Self-winding models in two sizes (41mm version pictured above), as well as Chronograph and Dual Time versions. All feature the emblematic look of the Overseas, including the six-sided bezel evocative of Vacheron’s Maltese Cross emblem, a motif that continues onto the links of the integrated bracelet. Rose gold is used for the cases, hands, and markers. Vacheron’s in-house movement (Caliber 5100 in the Automatic model) beats inside, amassing a 40-hour power reserve and bearing the Geneva Hallmark certification for accuracy and high-horology decorative mastery, including the openworked 22k gold rotor with the Overseas collection’s compass rose symbol. Like all contemporary Overseas models, the new models offer Vacheron’s proprietary quick-change system that allows the wearer to swap the bracelet for a rubber strap without tools.

History Revisited

Angelus Instrument de Vitesse Limited Edition

If you’ve ever wondered why anyone timing quick bursts of speed, like laps in an automobile race, needs a stopwatch that can accumulate times up to 12 hours, Angelus may have created your ideal timepiece. The historic brand pays homage to the golden age of motorsport, and strips the chronograph watch down to its original, bare-essential purpose, with the release of the Instrument de Vitesse, a set of two 25-piece limited editions in the historically inspired La Fabrique series. At first glance, the watch, in a slender 39mm case with ebony-black or ivory white dial, looks like a simple three-hander, but a closer look reveals the tachymeter scale around the periphery and the classical monopusher embedded in the crown; the latter activates the single chronograph hand in the center, which can be started, stopped and returned to zero by the same button to record elapsed times to a maximum of 60 seconds — perfect for taking average speed readings of fast-moving targets like race cars. The movement inside, Angelus Caliber A5000, is suitably old-school, with manual winding, a steady 3Hz frequency, and an integrated chronograph device with a column wheel and vertical clutch, and the dial, with its historical typography, would be at home on the dashboard of a classic car.

Cartier Privé Collection Tortue Monopoussoir

Like its predecessors in the exclusive, vintage-revival Cartier Privé collection, inaugurated in 2017, the Tortue Monopoussoir, a limited edition of 200 pieces, takes its cues from one of the watchmaker-jeweler’s classical, historic shaped timepieces — in this case, the Tortue (French for “turtle”), first created in 1912 as one of Cartier’s earliest models, after the Santos-Dumont (1904) and before the Tank (1917). The specific inspiration for the piece, however, arrived in 1928, as the first Tortue equipped with a monopusher chronograph, and was revived with some modern updates in 1998. Several of those updates are evident on the new watch, including the “apple”-shaped hands in blued steel, the hollowed-out central seconds hand, and triangular motifs in the dial’s corners. The two-register dial with elegant Roman numerals is bordered by a railway minute track, and the crown on the 43.7mm x 34.8mm turtle-shaped case (in gold or platinum) is fitted with a monopusher to activate the chronograph’s start, stop, and reset functions. Powering these functions is the manually winding, exquisitely decorated Caliber 1928 MC, situated behind a sapphire caseback that spotlights the motion of the gear train, column wheel, and Geneva-wave-finished, beveled bridges.

Parmigiani Toric Small Seconds

The Toric was the first wristwatch model created by Parmigiani Fleurier’s eponymous founder, Michel Parmigiani, back in 1996 at the brand’s inception. While aspects of the Toric — particularly its architecturally derived, Golden Mean-influenced proportions and fluted bezels echoing the look of ancient Roman columns — have been adopted by other product families in the collection, it has been quite a while since we’ve seen new versions of the Toric itself. For its relaunch in 2024, Parmigiani established some bold and very narrow parameters: all the watches will have in-house, manually winding movements; said movements will all use gold for their major parts, like the bridges and mainplates; the cases will only be made of gold or platinum, and even the dials and their hands and indexes will be crafted in gold. Perhaps just as boldly, Parmigiani says that Toric dials, all with a grained and beveled finish, will eschew the increasingly bright and audacious colorways of many of today’s popular timepieces in favor of a more understated, pastel palette that is “drawn from the chromatic universe of [Swiss architect] Le Corbusier,” of whose iconic work Michel Parmigiani has long been an admirer. Two versions were unveiled at Watches & Wonders, a sublimely simple Small Seconds model and the more complicated Chronograph Rattrapante. The straps (no bracelets), in Nubuck leather with a sartorial stitching technique perfected by Neapolitan tailors, carry forth the color scheme of the dials and fasten to the wrist with pin buckles made from the same precious metal as the case.

Zenith Defy Extreme Diver

Zenith surprised many with the launch of its first divers’ watch in decades, the Defy Extreme Diver, alongside a special, period-appropriate Revival Edition of the 1969 model that provides its template (covered in detail here). In many respects, the Zenith Extreme Diver is unmistakably a member of the modern Defy family, with its hallmark angular case (42mm in titanium) and dodecagonal bezel, but it also evokes its predecessor with its orange-detailed dial and “extreme” 600-meter water resistance, evidenced by the built-in helium-release valve — an impressive feat when its ancestor achieved it in 1969 and still a rarity in dive watches today. (Six hundred meters, incidentally, is equivalent to 1,969 feet, making for a utilitarian tribute to the Defy collection’s debut year.)  The dial, which color-matches the ceramic dive-scale bezel insert, has an engraved geometric motif of four-pointed stars and a sunburst finish that emanates from the Zenith star emblem at 12 o’clock. The hands and hour markers feature no less than three distinct pigments of X1 Super-LumiNova — blue, green, and orange — for optimum legibility in the dark or deep underwater.

Horological Milestones

A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold "Lumen"

Longtime fans of German high-horology house A. Lange & Söhne will find a lot to love about the new Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen, a limited edition of 50 pieces that commemorates 25 years since the launch of Lange’s first Datograph timepiece in 1999. Like its most recent predecessor in 2016, the high-complication watch marries three of the Saxon manufacture’s signature mechanisms — a flyback chronograph with a precisely jumping minutes counter; Lange’s hallmark “outsize” date display; a perpetual calendar with an ultra-precise moon-phase (deviating by a single day only once after 122.6 years) and with all indications controlled by a single rapid-adjustment button; and a one-minute-rotating tourbillon inside a filigreed cage, equipped with the world-first stop-seconds mechanism that Lange introduced in 2008, enabling the tourbillon to be stopped for precise setting of the movement. What’s new on this model are two additional elements that are exclusive to the brand and historically used to denote a very special edition: one is the use of Lange’s proprietary Honey Gold alloy for the 41.5mm case; the other is the “Lumen” treatment of the dial and its various displays, in which the movement, the in-house-made Caliber L952.4, is visible behind a semitransparent dial coated with a luminous compound — the same compound used in varying degrees of thickness on the hands, tachymeter-scale dial ring, date disks, moon-phase, and subdials. The darker the watch’s surroundings, the more radiant the ghostly green glow that it emits.

IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar

IWC refreshed its venerable Portugieser collection for 2024 and its high-complication centerpiece is one of the indisputable stars of this year’s Watches & Wonders. The Portugieser Eternal Calendar, explored in much more detail here, is the first timepiece whose calendar, leap years and all, will be precise for 400 years without corrections, and whose moon-phase display will remain accurate for an astonishing 45 million years. The watch’s most notable innovation is the newly developed “400 years gear,” which is designed to skip automatically over the years 2100, 2200, and 2300 — which would normally appear in the indication as leap years but are actually “common years,” according to the solar calendar — ensuring that the watch’s date won’t require a correction until the year 3999. The watch’s even more “eternal” feature is the moon-phase, equipped with a new “reduction gear train,” with three wheels and a specially developed tooth profile that can simulate many trillions of moon-phase scenarios occurring in the natural lunar cycle, thus ensuring that the display will deviate from the moon’s actual orbit only once in an astounding 45 million years. All of this cosmic complexity comes delivered in a very handsome and surprisingly compact package, with a 44.5mm case made of platinum and a frosted lacquer dial.

Jaeger-LeCoultre Duomètre Heliotourbillon Perpetual

“Watchmaker of Watchmakers” Jaeger-LeCoultre earned its historical sobriquet with this year’s horological chef d’oeuvre, the Duomètre Heliotourbillon Perpetual, whose signature innovation is the dynamic, world-first triple-axis tourbillon that spins like a top in an large aperture on the left side of the case. This visually arresting device, however, is only one of an array of technical marvels incorporated into the new in-house movement, manually wound Caliber 388. The “Duomètre” in the timepiece’s name refers to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s patented mechanism, introduced in 2007, that uses two separate barrels and gear trains, linked to a single regulator, to independently power the timekeeping and the additional complications, thus ensuring accuracy and less of a drain on the power supply. The “Heliotourbillon” is the aforementioned device, rotating on a cylindrical hairspring on three axes with three titanium cages: the first, set at a 90-degree angle to the balance wheel; the second, at 90 degrees to the first, both making a full rotation in 30 seconds; and the third, perpendicular to the second, making a full rotation in 60 seconds, all mounted on ceramic ball bearings to minimize friction. “Perpetual,” of course, denotes the perpetual calendar mechanism, which includes a Grade Date display, a super-accurate moon-phase, a patented leap year indication in red, and another world-first technical breakthrough: it’s the first perpetual calendar in which the hour and minute can be set backwards or forwards without doing damage to the synchrony of the calendar settings. Jaeger-LeCoultre packs all of this micromechanical wizardry into a 34-part rose-gold case measuring 44mm; as you’d expect, its rarity and exclusivity is baked into the production run: just 20 pieces will be made.

Patek Philippe World Time Reference 5330G-001

With the latest version of its iconic world-time watch, based on the very first one from the 1950s, Patek Philippe has proven once again that it doesn’t just make watches with high complications — it makes high complications that improve upon even the highest of existing complications. The latest edition, Ref. 5330G-001, addresses the persistent problem that has always been ingrained in even the most sophisticated world-timers: namely, that the wearer needed to adjust the date on such a watch (which corresponds with the local time selected, on both the hands and at 12 o’clock on the 24-city ring) whenever traveling to a new time zone after midnight or traveling west to east across the International Date Line. In the former situation, the date would need to advance forward by one; in the latter case, it needs to be moved back by one. Thanks to an ingenious, patented mechanism built into Patek’s new manufacture Caliber 240 HU C, which combines two concentric, star-shaped gear wheels with a differential system, pressing once on the 10 o’clock pusher adjusts not only the city disk, 24-hour disk and central hour hand, but also (when necessary) the date hand, in either direction, with no extra manual date correction needed. The indication of the date itself is a first for Patek Philippe, via a transparent glass hand with a red-lacquered hammer tip pointing to a transfer-printed 1-31 scale on the flange, which surrounds an opaline blue-gray dial center with an eye-catching carbon motif. It’s all housed in a relatively understated 40mm case in white gold, mounted on a handsome (albeit somewhat un-Patek-like) denim-motif calfskin strap.

Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon

As history-minded watch aficionados know, Piaget has a long history of making ultra-thin watches, starting with the revolutionary Caliber 9P in 1957 and continuing to set records in the category all the way up to 2018 with the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, the world’s thinnest wristwatch at the time. For its 150th anniversary in 2024, Piaget went all-out in challenging the frontiers of horological slimness with the release of its latest record-breaker, the Piaget Ultimate Concept Tourbillon, which somehow manages to incorporate a flying tourbillon cage into a waiflike 2mm-thick case. Yes, at least as of this writing, that is the world’s thinnest tourbillon watch (ball’s back in your court, Bulgari). How Piaget accomplished this feat is a three-year R&D journey that’s too complex to detail here, but essentially its watchmakers had to redesign the 2018 watch (which had no tourbillon) almost from the ground up. Like its predecessor, the new watch basically saves space by using the caseback as the movement mainplate and setting the crown flush into the caseband to be operated by a stylus. The material used for the case, measuring 41.5mm, is blue-PVD-treated cobalt, which offers the best thinness to hardness ratio. The tourbillon, made chiefly of titanium, is designed so it is anchored in place by its own perimeter via ceramic ball bearings; ball bearings also replace pivots in the mainspring system, reducing friction while still managing a power reserve of 40 hours when fully wound. The entire case (with a balance-wheel rim and a sapphire crystal both measuring a minuscule 2 microns) is only about as thick as a coin, and, according to Piaget, “made to be worn.”

TAG Heuer Monaco Split-Seconds Chronograph

Before Watches & Wonders kicked off, TAG Heuer was not a brand that most of us would have expected to see in this category, but its show-stopping Monaco Split-Seconds Chronograph proved to be undeniably one of the horological highlights of the show. Commemorating 55 years since the launch of the original Monaco in 1969, the new timepiece achieves an elite level of chronograph complication with its all-new movement, Caliber TH81-00, developed in a partnership between TAG Heuer and the specialists at Vaucher, which boasts the rare and exotic split-seconds function (aka a “rattrapante”), enabling the wearer to measure two concurrent timing events independently. For the first time, the Monaco, named for a famous Grand Prix race and famously worn by racing drivers of the 1970s, is capable of timing multiple laps on a racetrack in quick succession. The avant-garde elements don’t end with the mechanism: the famous square case is made of lightweight titanium, framing a sapphire dial that affords a view of the movement from the front, whose blued, arching bridges have a gradient surface achieved through an anodizing process. The 9 o’clock rattrapante pusher is made of colored titanium and matches the color of the split-seconds hand for an additional dash of color. Finally, in a first for the brand, the entire caseback is made from sapphire for an unobstructed view of the complex movement — the first, TAG Heuer says, in a renewed commitment to exploring high complications in future special editions.