Being at Baselworld is Complicated

Complications are the street cred for Swiss watches that want to be taken seriously. The more number you can cram on a watch, the more highly you are regarded

By Rohin Dharmakumar

Published: Mar 10, 2012 02:41:10 PM IST

Updated: Jul 6, 2012 03:21:52 PM IST

The sheer number of “complications” – essentially any watch function beyond just telling the time, like day, moon-phases, calendars, chronograph etc. – that are on display is mind boggling.

Complications are the street cred for Swiss watches that want to be taken seriously. The more number you can cram on a watch (a mechanical one mind you, not a quartz one), the more highly you are regarded. The more challenging a complication, the more prestigious your brand. And if your complication is both new and patentable, consider it the best.

Complications have been around since the 18th century in Swiss watches. But after the nearly catastrophic crisis the industry faced in the 1960s and 1970s due to the rise of inexpensive and yet accurate quartz watches, complications have become far more important in the business of Swiss watchmaking.

Because while the eponymous Swatch quartz watch, launched in 1983, might have rescued the industry from being decimated by the Japanese, it is mechanical watches that maintain the aura around the “Swiss Made” brand.

Within high-end Swiss watches, complications are seen as impenetrable defences against cheaper competitors. Replicating them is not easy thanks to the extremely complex and minute hand work that goes into making each one of them, something for which watchmakers train for years and decades.

More importantly, complications are bought and valued by customers not so much for the functionality they offer – like a moon-phase or chronograph or multiple time zones – but in appreciation for the sheer craft of making them by hand.

But in more and more cases I see watches that are literally crammed with complication upon complication ranging from the common ones like day, annual calendar, chronograph, moon-phase, power reserve to the high-end ones like tourbillons and repeaters.

The results are watches that are inordinately expensive (from a few ten thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands) and often visually cluttered. In fact many of them would qualify to be mobile horological museums, I suppose.

The rush to build and sell complications also seems like a way to tap the newly rich in markets like China who it seems will spare no expense to have a conversation piece on their wrist.

But the Chinese economy has already started cooling, with predicted growth rates now reduced to 7.5 percent. And as economies mellow down, so do their citizens tastes in expensive watches.

That has already happened with the larger watch industry over the last two years as consumer tastes have shifted away from large, complex and cluttered designs towards smaller, more classic and easier to read ones.

(Left) The simple and classic Zenith Captain Central Second next to the Zenith Christopher Colomb Equation of Time (Right) with “Gravity Control” module suspended in a bubble. Simple versus Complex. Take your pick.

If there is a complications per watch ratio for the industry, I’ll wager that it is close to its peak today and will start to gradually taper off towards a long term average in the next few years.

Towards the end of my day I met with one of the biggest iconoclasts within Baselworld – Fawaz Gruosi, the founder of luxury jewellery and watch maker de Grisogono.

The 60-year old started de Grisogono in Geneva in 1993 and then burst on the international jewellery scene with his “black diamond” (a naturally occurring stone called Carbonado) collection. He recollects his peers in the industry laughing upon the concept of a black diamond. “In a few years most of them were using the same stones in their collections,” he says.

In 2000 Gruosi introduced his first watch, a mechanical one featuring two timezones and an off-center date calendar. From then till now de Grisogono has pushed the edges of Swiss watchmaking by coming up with radically different complications inside its signature Baroque-themed chunky cases.

In 2005 he came up with a watch, the Occhio Ripetizione Minuti, which featured a James Bond-like dial made of 12 titanium blades that opened out at the touch of button to reveal the watch’s movement beneath in addition to a minute repeater (a complication that strikes the time using different sounds to indicate hours and minutes).

Occhio Ripetizione Minuti

The Meccanico dG unveiled in 2008 had two time zones, one of which looked like a digital one but in reality was a massively complex system of 651 mechanical components, including 23 cams (that formed the digital display) operated through synchronized gears.

(Left) Meccanico dG, (Center) Otturatore, (Right) Instrumento N Uno XL

Gruosi showed me his latest big bet, the Otturatore. The watch features four complications – a smaller seconds counter, date, power reserve and moon-phase – hidden under a mechanical, rotating dial that cycles through them at the push of a button. Gruosi says the acceleration of the dial as it speeds through these is 9g, equal roughly to a jet plane’s. “We had to keep working at it for months because the force was so great that it ended up damaging the movement,” he says.

Where does he come up with these crazy ideas? And why?

“Take 5-6 high-end Swiss watches, say A, B, C, D and E, and keep them together but mask out their names. Then ask a regular person to identify which is which, they will not be able to. But keep one of my watches next to them and we will stand out. We have done complications in 8-10 years that many brands 100-150 years old haven’t been able to,” he says.

Next to these crazy complications is also kept the new Instrumento N° Uno XL, a new men’s watch featuring de Grisogono’s traditional Baroque style but featuring a dial made of polished ebony wood.

It’s classy, simple and unique – exactly how Gruosi probably wanted it to be.