Watches and Wonders 2024

The fair ran from 9 to 15 April 2024. Rolex’s week was mostly precious metal. A platinum 1908 carried ice-blue rice-grain guilloché. Ice-blue is a cold colour on platinum. Rice-grain keeps it from going blank. Calibre 7140 sits underneath that surface, which is where April started: with a dial you have to stay with, before anyone needed a second hour.

Sky-Dweller on a gold Jubilee

The Sky-Dweller went onto a gold Jubilee for the first time. That is the Sky-Dweller’s April. Not a new face. A bracelet. It is easy to treat a Jubilee as finishing, as something said on the way to steel. The bracelet is the watch. Gold on those links is the metal the Sky-Dweller now keeps.

First time is a serious phrase when it is attached to a bracelet. Rolex had not done this. Every Sky-Dweller week before this one chose otherwise. This one put gold on the Jubilee, which is a longer decision than it sounds. Guilloché is a surface you stop for. A Jubilee is the metal that stays in the light whether you are looking or not. April gave the Sky-Dweller that gold, and that is enough to make it part of the week rather than a note in someone else’s story.

Preference, if it is allowed: this is the Rolex decision I would keep. A first-time bracelet changes the whole watch. It does not decorate an edge.

A slate Day-Date

New Day-Date dials were part of April. The one that holds is a slate ombré on the 40 mm. The Day-Date’s week was a dial week. Slate is not ice-blue. It does not flash, and it does not ask for pearl. Ombré means the colour has a direction: denser in one place, thinner in another, so the face is not one note.

Forty millimetres is a lot of slate to travel across. That is why the size matters here. It is not a Deepsea’s forty-four, and it is not trying to be. It is a round Day-Date with room for the ombré to move as the light moves. A Day-Date can take a loud dial and survive it. This one is quieter than that, and better: no second colour on a bezel, no stones, only slate doing the work.

New dials, plural. The ombré is the one worth stopping on. If the Sky-Dweller’s April was a bracelet, the Day-Date’s was a face. You can argue which lasts longer. The week had both, and it did not make you choose.

Pearl and diamonds on the Daytona

The Cosmograph Daytona work was mother-of-pearl and diamond bezels. That is the Daytona’s April, and it is not a small one. Mother-of-pearl does not sit still. It breaks the light. Put it on a Cosmograph and the watch becomes a surface first, a Daytona second, which is a more interesting Cosmograph than it sounds.

Diamond bezels take the same thought to the edge. The bezel is stones. Not a scale you come to read. Stones. April put diamonds where a Cosmograph often puts information, and mother-of-pearl where it often puts enamel or white. If that reads as jewellery, let it. The Daytona can take jewellery. This week it did.

Stay with the pearl a moment longer. It is not ice-blue rice-grain, and it is not slate. It has depth without pretending to be a dive watch’s depth. The Daytona in April was allowed to be decorative without apology. That belongs to the week as much as any steel that came after it.

Gold on a Deepsea

Yellow gold on a Deepsea, for the first time. Reference 136668LB. What is gold doing on a Deepsea? The question is the watch. Blue Cerachrom and a blue dial keep the water’s colours. The case does not. Three thousand nine hundred metres is still the rating. Gold does not cancel it. Gold makes it strange.

A titanium caseback is the honest seam: yellow gold where the week wanted to be seen, another metal where the case closes. Calibre 3235 is the same calibre as the steel Deepsea, 136660, which shares that depth and does not share the argument. What the steel watch adds is bulk as a fact of the cuff: 44 mm, 17.7 mm thick, 51.4 mm lug to lug. A Deepsea takes that space in the Sea-Dweller line whether the case is steel or gold. Gold does not shrink it. Gold asks whether the space was ever only about depth.

The steel watch is the Deepsea. The gold watch is April wearing a Deepsea’s rating. Both can be true. Only one of them needed this fair to exist for the first time.

The steel GMT-Master II

Steel still had a GMT-Master II. The 126710GRNR is grey-and-black Cerachrom, a black dial, GMT-Master II in green on that dial, a green 24-hour hand. A blue-and-black steel GMT-Master II already existed. Grey is a new temperature, not a new idea. The left-handed 126720VTNR is green and black, and it also has a green 24-hour hand. Green is a family habit. The bezel is the new work.

Forty millimetres occupies a cuff as a round GMT occupies a cuff, which is not how 44 mm of Deepsea occupies a cuff. Calibre 3285, seventy hours, 100 metres: enough for a GMT, and not the point of one. The point is grey where blue had been, and a second hour that still lives on a 24-hour bezel.

Cartier Dual Time and a Black Bay 58 GMT

Does a second hour belong on a 24-hour bezel, at six on a Santos, or on a 39 mm 58? The Rolex answer is the bezel, read against that green hand. The GRNR does not reopen the method. It restates it in grey and black.

Cartier added a Dual Time to Santos de Cartier. The WSSA0076 has an anthracite dial, a second time zone and day/night at six, a bracelet with a strap you can swap. Leather is a choice. Heat matters if the strap is leather. The second hour here is not a bezel. It waits at six, with day and night beside it. The case is 40.2 × 47.5 mm, a Santos shape, longer than it is wide, 10.1 mm thick, so the extra hour does not become a block. Of the three answers, this is the one I would trust to keep another zone without making the watch a GMT first.

Tudor put a GMT into the Black Bay 58. The M7939G1A0NRU has a burgundy-and-black bezel. The second hour on a 39 mm 58 is an argument about scale. It does not need Rolex’s forty millimetres, and it does not need a register at six, if the case is 12.8 mm and the bezel is burgundy. Two hundred metres is more depth than the steel GMT-Master II claims. Thirty-nine millimetres is less watch. It occupies a cuff the way a 58 occupies a cuff: closer to the round GMT than to the Deepsea, and unembarrassed about the millimetre it refused. That is a complete answer. It is not the only one April gave.