It’s Complicated...
As the 19th century progressed, a complicated pocket watch became the must-have tech gadget for the super-rich and a sine qua non of the great World’s Fairs.
For a brand that is widely seen as one of the most, if not the most, conservative of watchmakers, Patek Philippe still manages to shake things up admirably. Take this past spring and summer. After industry “pundits” confidently predicted that Patek would not be launching anything new this year, the company dropped a limited-edition steel time-and-date watch to celebrate the opening of its new manufacturing building. Then, just before he took his summer break, president Thierry Stern e-mailed his clients to let them know he was unveiling three more watches, each with a superlative complication: a minute repeater, a split-seconds chronograph, a new version of the perpetual-calendar chrono 5270. And not a Nautilus among them.
The last five years or so have been characterized by a mania for steel sports watches, and over that time prices for Patek’s Nautilus and Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak have completely ignored the forces of gravity—had Isaac Newton been working today, he would not have come up with his career-defining theory looking at prices of these two classic 1970s integrated case-and-bracelet designs by Gérald Genta. Following
