F. P. Journe is a watchmaking phenomenon, but his new restaurant in Geneva is helping him become a lifestyle brand

By Nicholas Foulkes

One of the gifts of twenty-twenty hindsight is that those could-have-should-have and wished-I-would-have moments snap into unforgivingly sharp focus. A couple of years ago, I was reproaching myself for the Bitcoin that I did not buy, but the deflation of the crypto bubble has allowed a much older, more enduring regret to reassert itself—the fact that I never bought an F. P. Journe.

I remember once upon a time you could walk into a Journe shop and, mirabile dictu, purchase one of his new watches there and then. I also recall how they would crop up at auction frequently READ ON

Millennials are crazy about “neo-vintage” watches, which re-create the overlooked styles of the 80s and provide rare value too

By Nicholas Foulkes

The Knights of the Round Table quested in search of the Holy Grail. Ponce de León scoured Florida for the Fountain of Youth. Alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone that would transmute base metal into gold. And for the last decade and a half marketing people have been obsessed with reaching millennials.

I am no marketing expert, but so relentless has the bombardment of demographic pseudo-science been (my favorite was the introduction that I received into the mysteries of something called “millennial pink”) that I believe we have been overcomplicating things.

The surprising but, when you think about it, logical READ ON

The colorful, throwaway timepiece of the 1980s—the Swatch—is back and in high demand

By Nicholas Foulkes

Forty years after it first appeared, the stars, or rather the planets, have aligned for Swatch in a way that few, me included, could have imagined.

Rewind to the end of March last year. The watch world was getting ready for the first post-coronavirus iteration of the annual Watches and Wonders fair, when—Boom!—Swatch dropped a bomb in the form of a series of watches heavily, ahem, inspired by Omega’s Speedmaster, the watch NASA took to the moon.

Swatch does not exhibit at Watches and Wonders, so this was textbook disruptor stuff: the industry was looking in one READ ON

The king of watches is moving forward by embracing emojis, titanium, and its own storied past

By Nicholas Foulkes

One morning in 1908, “while riding on the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus along Cheapside in the City of London, a genie whispered ‘Rolex’ in my ear.” The ear into which that supernatural being whispered belonged to the 27-year-old Hans Wilsdorf, a German émigré with a business importing and distributing timepieces. On July 2 of that year he registered that strange five-letter word as a trademark in Switzerland.

The derivation and meaning of the word continue to be debated: some believe it to be acronymic and to come from “hoROLogical EXcellence,” or, even more prosaically, “ROLling EXport.” Lost READ ON

The watches of Philippe Dufour and François-Paul Journe are being praised across the world, selling for millions at auction, and inspiring a whole new generation of independent watchmakers

By Nicholas Foulkes

I may not have qualified for a seat in Westminster Abbey for the coronation, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at an event that was its equivalent in terms of horological heft.

In place of the soaring, vaulted nave of the medieval church, celebrants gathered under a large, transparent PVC marquee pitched in an idyllic mountain meadow on the fringes of the small village of Le Brassus, 3,000 feet up in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux, the traditional heartland of Swiss watchmaking.

Unless you happen to be one of the 600 or so souls who call the place READ ON

From the Met Gala in New York to the factories in Switzerland, AIR MAIL’s horological expert believes that the sum of all human achievement can be found in watches

By Nicholas Foulkes

I do not remember exactly when it became important to know how attendees at the Met Gala were able to tell the time. But over the last five or six years, the watches on display here have integrated themselves into the news cycle around the Oscars of the Upper East Side.

This year, even before all the attendees had reached their tables, wrist-watching social-media feeds, watch-spotting Web sites, and brand P.R. departments had cranked into action, making sure this vital news was ready for consumption when the world awoke.

I remember the horological impact of the Met Gala first registering, READ ON