Time Crafters - Spotlight on Fine Watchmaking in NYC
WORLDTEMPUS - 16 May 2011
This weekend in New York City, savvy watch collectors were treated to an alluring event: TimeCrafters, New York City's first luxury watch fair open to the public. Held at the Times Center (the event was hosted by the New York Times), the exhibit showcased a display of the newest timepieces from 19 of the most prestigious brands on the market. The show, organized by Editions Temps International, was three days long and designed to educate the public about fine watchmaking.
As such, the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH) brought in a wonderful display from Switzerland of more than 50 historical timepieces that trace mechanical watchmaking. Among the pieces on exhibit were a fifteenth-century mechanical clock by Nicolas Copernicus and several important sixteenth and seventeenth-century pieces by such illustrious names of the past as Christiaan Huygens, Daniel Quare and Thomas Thompson. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century watches included pieces by Perrelet, Lepine, Leschot, Breguet, Winnerl, LeCoultre, Harwood and Wilsdorf. The twentieth-century exhibit offered travel and dive watches, electrical energy watches and technical and precious pieces. This may well be the most comprehensive historical watch exhibit yet to come to America. At the same time, the FHH announced it would take the historical exhibit to the Las Vegas trade shows, including JCK, which take place in two weeks.
To underscore the time-consuming, painstaking and exacting work that goes into the making of a watch, the exhibit included several master artisans demonstrating their extraordinary crafts: a master watchmaker, a superb gem-setter and a beveler were each at their own workbenches practicing their crafts.
The opening day of the fair was well attended by executives of all of the brands, including many from Switzerland, and a host of collectors. "We are hoping the entire weekend will be filled with b attendance," said John Simonian, distributor for Richard Mille in the United States. Most other brand representatives reflected the same sentiment, but were already buoyed by the attractive attendance by collectors that had shaped up half way through the first day.
Partaking in this first venture were A. Lange & Söhne, Audemars Piguet, Baume & Mercier, Bulgari, Cartier, Chopard, Girard-Perregaux, Harry Winston, Hublot, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, JeanRichard, Montblanc, Officine Panerai, Richard Mille, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Zenith.