Form follows function, so the saying goes. This is even the founding principle of Ressence, a brand whose design principle revolves around (pardon the pun) rotating parts. A watch is round because of a component whose primary purpose is to rotate a series of gears connected to two hands that make a circular motion. So there you have it: watches are round!
The weight of history
What may seem obvious today hasn’t always been so. Think of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso (1931) with its rectangular movement inside an equally rectangular case. The baguette movement that Vincent Calabrese designed for Corum and its Golden Bridge in 1980. The Monaco V4 by TAG Heuer, driven by belts pulled tight inside a square case, exactly 20 years ago in 2004. Maurice Lacroix‘s Square Wheel in 2010. The Cartier Crash Skeleton, from 2015, whose movement mirrors the curves of its curiously distorted case. These examples, just some among many, are proof that certain watchmakers refuse to go round in circles.
What goes around…
This tendency has never disappeared; some brands have even banished the circle from their vocabulary and made non-round shapes a symbol of their identity. First to spring to mind, Richard Mille rarely deals in round, preferring its signature tonneau. It’s a creative language shared with Hublot, whose Spirit of Big Bang collection is defined by its tonneau shape. Following in their footsteps is independent brand Bianchet, although its movement channels a more subtle geometry, with delicate curves informed by the Fibonacci spiral.
Still, the most striking example of this uncircularity can be summed up in two letters: B and R, for Bell & Ross. Inspired by an airplane’s flight instruments, the brand’s core identity of a square shape defines the BR watches that have forged its success. The vibe is young, powerful, mechanical.
Crossing the Alps, that most Swiss of Italian brands (or is it the other way round?) has taken a different route. Bulgari’s building block is the octagon, a geometric form that runs through the jeweller’s Roman origins. While the movement inside is perfectly round, the case is a fabulous creative endeavour that assembles no fewer than 58 facets, and not a curve in sight.
All or nothing
Now - and this is new - brands are taking a more radical stance. The pro-rounds pursue their ideal to a degree of absolute purity. As mentioned, circles and rotation are intrinsic to Belgian brand Ressence. The up-and-coming Kross Studio label takes a similar approach, with cases whose circular perfection doesn’t even authorise a crown in its traditional form. Purnell’s mechanically complex movements are only ever enclosed in round cases. The same is true of Jaquet Droz which, since its revival in the early 2000s, inscribes its watches inside an immaculate circle.
Others are circle-phobic and make it a point of honour to avoid anything remotely round. Only a true connoisseur could name more than two round Urwerk watches – such a thing exists but is excessively rare. As for MB&F, of its 15 Horological Machines, just one (HM7) is round. Behrens gives its watches (with the exception of the Perigee) an acrobatic, quasi asymmetric shape. Leaving aside the smaller workshop-brands, the latest design from the powerhouse of the Swiss watch industry is strictly square. Its name? The Swatch What If?. What if, indeed.
