SIHH - Real, Unreal, Surreal

The SIHH closed almost two weeks ago, but some impressions remain: particularly the excitement of a handmade watch due to be finished within four years.

WORLDTEMPUS - 1 February 2012

Elizabeth Doerr

Chronicle

Dinner with supermodels, conversations with princes and polo players, so little sleep as to be on the verge of exhaustion, and handling hundreds of watches adding up to millions and millions of *insert currency here* – this is the reality that is the week of SIHH.

The smoke and mirror world of luxury is revealed in no better place than the exorbitant fair that has taken place in Geneva for the last 22 years. This is locality where the average-earning journalist slurps champagne and resides in five-star hotels. It is a place where the surreal becomes real and the miniscule becomes enormous.


Back to the roots

It’s easy to get caught up in this world, much easier than anyone would think. This is one of the reasons I was personally so very happy to discover the project to which Greubel Forsey has dedicated some of its resources. Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey are two of the most “real” watchmakers I know. Their interests – as far as I can tell – are primarily centered on progressive watchmaking and how to continue the interesting research their paths have led them to embark upon. I’m not saying what they choose to do is completely selfless, but I am saying that from where I stand their scope seems to be less dictated by pecuniary interests than that of many other brands and watchmakers. What they do is definitely art, but they are much more clever and pragmatic about it than many others. And to me, they don’t lose sight of where they come from and where they want to go. This is important.

Left to right: Michel Boulanger, Stephen Forsey and Philippe Dufour demonstrate handmade skills at Greubel Forsey’s SIHH booth © Worldtempus / Ian Skellern

Greubel and Forsey were among the initiators of the Time Aeon and now-defunct Pleiad movements, which – even though it never really got off the ground – focused on promoting watchmaking as a human art form. Another one of the driving forces behind this movement was Philippe Dufour. Not coincidentally, he is also majorly involved in this new initiative, the likes of which one seldom sees.

Le Garde Temps is what these gentlemen are calling the project that centers around Michel Boulanger, a master watchmaker who teaches at Paris’s School of Watchmaking. Boulanger has taken a sabbatical from his day job for four years to take part in what I hope is a project that will ignite a new spark.

“Garde temps” is a play on French words: guarding time, saving time, it is also the French word for a precision timekeeper. What these four gentlemen aim to do is preserve the original art of watchmaking by demonstrating that one can still fully make a watch by hand, much in the way that George Daniels created his immortal timepieces and Dufour still creates his – though the latter does have a little machined help for his small series. In this day and age, I could not pinpoint another watchmaker as ambitious as this when CNC and other machines are so readily available.

Stephen Forsey inspects one of the components; both Forsey and Dufour are known as absolutely perfectionists when it comes to finish © Worldtempus / Ian Skellern

Funding

The project is fully funded by Greubel Forsey, though support from the Fondation de Haute Horlogerie (FHH) has also been requested. This means that Greubel Forsey pays Boulanger’s salary for the four years he is on sabbatical, for any materials that need to be purchased – though since all of the tools in use are “vintage,” many are already in possession of the quartet – and for the PR and anything else that is related. Dufour donates his time, experience and considerable influence in the high-end industry. Though this is entirely another subject, may it be added that Dufour’s watches – as rare and sought-after as they are by collectors – are in no way overpriced and quite possibly this grand master of watchmaking just makes a living from them, in great contrast to Daniels’ amassed fortune by his death last year.

In my humble opinion, for those involved this project is not about earning a great fortune, it is very obviously about perpetuating skills that will soon become lost. “We should stop calling our modern watchmakers watchmakers,” Dufour said to me during the SIHH week. “They are operators.” It was like he was echoing some words I had spoken myself several months ago. And perhaps he was; we tend to think a bit alike.

Michel Boulanger operates the hand-cranked mandrill tool at the SIHH © Worldtempus / Ian Skellern

Surreal

When I walked into the Greubel Forsey booth at the SIHH, I could hardly believe my eyes. I had not yet heard through the proverbial grapevine that is usually loud and clear in Switzerland that this project was taking place. I was floored, humbled, awed and euphoric all at the same time. What a worthwhile initiative.

Very apparently, I am probably one of the few who experienced all these grand emotions at the same time. I have been watching the online world closely: except for Ian Skellern’s excellent reporting, thewatches.tv’s awe-inspiring video work and some forum activity on The Purists and TimeZone, there has been nary a peep. I have heard and seen little else in English regarding this glorious project since the SIHH opened on January 16. Shortly after the fair, during a private conversation with a couple of other independent watchmakers I mentioned how enamored I was of the project. My conversation partners hesitated for a moment before replying that they thought it was a great PR stunt. Excuse me?

Have we really become this jaded? I couldn’t wait to get back to the office to spread the news: someone is actually going to make a fully handmade watch from start to finish completely in the tradition of the founding fathers that we oh-so-often cite such as Breguet, Graham and Arnold. Isn’t this huge news?

It probably isn’t because you can’t sell it, it won’t make anyone any money, no one will be wearing it, it won’t bear the colors of the season, it won’t involve new materials, and most news propagators likely find it too unglamorous to spend their time with – if they even understand what it really means to our industry. Is high watchmaking that susceptible to trends? Maybe it is.

I, for one, will be following this project with intense excitement. Lunching with some of my favorite watchmakers is far more preferable to dining with celebrities: the conversation is certainly more intense.

This mandrill tool actually belongs to Philippe Dufour, and it was on show all week at the Greubel Forsey booth at the SIHH  © Worldtempus / Ian Skellern