They come with an instruction manual as thick as a telephone directory. Or, even worse, as slim as an August magazine issue. And yet sometimes even these instructions aren’t enough. Some watches these days have become so sophisticated that you need a two-day residential course to understand how to set them, or even to tell the time. With their multiple displays and ever more refined concepts, someof the most highly sophisticated watches succeed in producing only utter bafflement.
Andit’s not necessarily the concept itself that is difficult to grasp. Quite often, the ideas are easily explained in simple, metaphorical, even poetical terms. But if you want to actually understand how the thing works, it’s a different matter. Let’s look at the Dressage L’Heure Masquée by Hermès. Under normal circumstances it displays the minute – just the minute. In a small window, there’s the legend “GMT”. So... does that mean that it’s the GMT minute? No. By pressing on a pusher, the watch now shows the hour, with a second time zone appearing in the window. But it’s not entirely logical, and the watch itself is very misleading. You have to constantly bear in mind this watch’s raison d’être, which is to illustrate an indirect relationship with time, and provide a meta-analysis of watchmaking. Do you think you can manage that, when you’re jolted awake at 2 in the morning? How about after a couple of glasses of wine?
