For the first time, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with a press release that just landed in my in-box. This was disorienting. Agreement is not a position I’ve found myself taking vis-a-vis press materials before. Most aren’t pushing anything to agree or disagree with in the first place. But as I read the PDF explaining Lederer’s new watch (the CIC 39, already sold out), I was nodding my head approvingly the whole way down.
The watch takes on the historically significant and rather fascinating detent escapement invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet, but what struck me about this press release was the philosophical statements woven into almost every paragraph. Together, these statements formed a coherent—yet wonderfully dreamy—philosophy of watchmaking that also (perhaps unwittingly) lodges a long-needed critique of the Swiss watch industry writ large.
I mean, this is a really good press release. It comes from Bernhard Lederer, one of the few great living independent watchmakers to come out of the generation that gave us Philippe Dufour, F. P. Journe, Kari Voutilainen and Laurent Ferrier—a tiny ilk of true masters.
Check out these extracted bits from the CIC 39’s press release, which in condensed form read like a hybrid of Wittenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
“…a watch is never an object, it is a manifestation of thought.”
“[Watchmaking’s] future belongs to those who pursue sincerity rather than spectacle.”
“…a creation has value only if it solves a real mechanical challenge, clarifies a system, stabilizes energy, or deepens understanding. Anything else is only noise.”
“Advancement cannot betray the craft.”
“Independence is not solitude….”
“Aesthetics arise not from decoration…”
“Every aesthetic choice in the [watch] exists to serve the mechanics.”
“…the elegance of a mechanism that has nothing to hide, only truth to reveal.”
“A movement should teach.”
“Its architecture is not merely functional; it is didactic.”
“Each wheel, bridge, and lever is placed with intent so that the movement reads clearly, teaching the eye how energy travels and how precision is earned.”
“…the [watch] expresses precision with a calm, almost meditative authority.”
“[The watch] does not demand attention; it invites a quieter form of fascination.”
“…a quieter form of fascination.”
Many years ago, I started a podcast called Beyond the Dial that set out to explore the intersection of aesthetics and mechanics in watchmaking. I didn’t set out to explore mechanics and aesthetics separately, or even in parallel; I intended to explore the intersectionality of mechanics and aesthetics, what I envision as a kind of blurry overlaying of the Venn diagram’s circles into a unified field of aesthetic-mechanical creation from which those attuned to it could sometimes derive a state of prolonged wonder, a horological high.
A few truly great watches seamlessly fuse mechanics and aesthetics: Patek Philippe’s Ref. 1518, F.P. Journe’s Chronomètre à Résonance, the Lange 1, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Master Hybris Mechanica Calibre 362. These watches, and precious few others, have transcended trends and can reliably engender the horological high, that uniquely prolonged state of wonder, that “quieter form of fascination,” as Lederer aptly puts it.
On the podcast, I struggled to express what this high was, exactly. I used phrases like “the phenomenology of watches,” “mechanical wonder,” and “tripping on watches” to expound the idea that—since telling the time was no longer the point of looking at a mechanical wristwatch—experiencing a heightened state of mind might be.
Watches are aesthetic objects, of course. All objects are. But when I allow watches to become mere objects of style, the psychological balm, the horological high, the sweet buzz of time abstracted via a tiny machine…it all just evaporates. When this happens, I find myself chasing down some passing trend, or vying for social position in the horological hierarchy, worried about what so-and-so would think of my so-called wrist-game. And then I’d grow cynical about watches and, in the end, bored with them.
Grokking mechanics to some degree is fundamental to my achieving the horological high, “the quieter form of fascination.” Promoting this state of mind, I will argue, should be the core mission of the Swiss watch industry. This message is implicit in Lederer’s philosophy.
The Sweeping Problem
I believe that social media and the mass popularization of watches it helped foster have made it much harder to filter out the buzz of fast-fashion and tune into the hard-hitting horological high I was pushing via Beyond the Dial.
With a tiny glimmer of hope, I sense a return to mechanical concerns across the industry as the post-pandemic markets calm down. I sense that serious watch maisons are realizing that something more than a sage-green dial or some clever “collab watch” is required to draw serious collectors back to their latest offerings. The bubble burst around 2023, and now the hype-fest is cooling down. I’m seeing little glimpses of a return to mechanical concerns from Panerai, Breguet, Vacheron Constantin, and even Rolex.
Lederer’s recent release of the CIC 39 (as well as the other five watches in his Masters of Escapement series) may point the way for the watch industry to regain its hold on generating that elusive sense of mechanical wonder in its customers. This is certainly the highest calling of the enterprise called watchmaking, and it is well worth considering how the Swiss watch industry can humbly return that sense of mechanical wonder to primacy.
The Language of a Master
The philosophy of Lederer, so eloquently woven into this recent press release, is built from the astute language of a master who knows about mechanical wonder, about attaining horological highs, about transcending the surface of visual aesthetics (i.e., going beyond the dial) and basking in the blurry merger I call mechanical-aesthetics.
If Lederer’s philosophy of watchmaking wasn’t sincere, this language would be easy to dismiss as just more high-handed marketing fluff, of which a great deal emanates from the Swiss watch industry. But the Lederer release rings sincere—even humble—when considered within the context of the mechanical problems with which he toils.
“A mechanism must solve a real problem. If it doesn’t, it remains an idea, not watchmaking. For centuries, the detent escapement had potential locked inside it. I wanted to give it a voice,” Lederer is quoted as saying in the press release for the CIC 39.
I’m reminded of John Coltrane, the jazz saxophonist who toiled humbly for well over a decade before finally figuring out how to go beyond the bold accomplishments of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Many great artists toil tirelessly in the shadow of a specific forebearer, a (usually deceased) master who haunts them with lingering unanswered questions.
Coltrane once said, “I’ve had a strange career. I haven’t yet quite found out how I want to play music. Most of what’s happened these past few years has been questions. Someday we’ll find the answers.”
“We go where watchmaking has questions left to answer,” Lederer says in the press release, sounding just like Coltrane.
The Detent Escapement and its Problems
Others of Lederer’s generation have toiled with Breguet’s escapements (both the natural and detent mechanisms), including Laurent Ferrier and Kari Voutilainen The problems inherent to these mechanisms loom large, nagging the great masters to solve them.
You can find dozens of videos depicting the detent escapement’s fascinating motion, which will serve you better than my attempts at explanation. What I can confirm is that for centuries the detent escapement had suffered from limitations that make it unsuitable for use in everyday watches. It’s hard to get going once the movement has stopped, for one, and it is prone to instability at low amplitude, which is required for any meaningful power reserve in the relatively small space of a wristwatch movement.
Lederer claims to have toiled—and, importantly, failed repeatedly—with the detent escapement for decades, slowly building up his understanding of the mechanism’s limitations and eventually finding workable solutions.
The result of Lederer’s protracted effort is a gorgeous movement that runs the revised detent escapement off of a center-mounted balance cock. The escapement drives two independent gear trains, a configuration similar to the natural escapement-driven movement in his Central Impulse Chronometer of 2022, one of the six movements that Lederer is releasing as part of his Masters of Escapement series.
Humility and Slowness Can Reset the Watch Industry
As I read the press release for this watch, I hear a not-entirely subtle critique of the mainstream Swiss watch industry. Lederer’s philosophy of watchmaking is tersely in opposition to what has become the operable norm of Swiss watchmaking today: namely, that style and decoration (from gratuitous dial treatments to gaudy pave cases and trendy reissues) dominate watch design.
“Aesthetics arise not from decoration…”
“…a creation has value only if it solves a real mechanical challenge, clarifies a system, stabilizes energy, or deepens understanding. Anything else is only noise.”
“[Watchmaking’s] future belongs to those who pursue sincerity rather than spectacle.”
In espousing this philosophy, Lederer is, I think, showing the watch industry how it might rearrange its priorities and, with that, keep itself from bleeding out while caught in the hype-trap. The underlying message is that the marketing strategies of large luxury groups have sacrificed too much in service of social media’s voraciousness and the fashion industry’s quarterly renewals. Watchmaking that allows the inherently slow development of genuine mechanical innovation to (literally) undergird aesthetics can never keep that pace.
It is abundantly obvious to me that the reason Swiss watchmaking today can feel so spurious, so devoid of meaning, at times so blatantly dumb, is that too many brands insist on attempting to keep an unreasonable pace dictated by the demands of their marketing departments and not their R&D divisions. This hyper-pace has resulted in a splintering of annual collections into monthly, sometimes weekly, introductions of new dial colors, limited editions wrapped in weak partnership narratives, endless announcements about who wore which watch to what red-carpet event, and the press release I received last year asking me to tell my readers about a new strap color on offer for a watch already released multiple times with increasingly horrendous dial colors. I’m confident that this is the “noise” to which Lederer refers.
With a measure of compassion, I understand that the onset of social media, the broadening of luxury markets, and the demand for quarterly ROI have pressured the great watchmakers of Switzerland (and elsewhere) to hustle beyond their capacity for genuine innovation. We all get it on some level; the impact is felt across industries around the world—including journalism.
But wasn’t watchmaking meant to be that one oasis of enduring sanity in a desert of spurious luxury madness? Or, shouldn’t it be?
Over and over we’ve seen the mandates for growth destroy the integrity of horological endeavors ranging from publications to philanthropic programs to entire watch brands. At some point an industry gets stretched too far and can lose something essential, allowing consumer cynicism to creep in. Watchmaking has to at least consider resetting its priorities around something other than striving to keep pace with the mad tempos of social media and the world of fashion into which it seems so desperate to enter.
It’s time to put mechanical wonder back at the center of watchmaking, to respect the actual history of mechanical watchmaking rather than perennially spinning that history up into some seasonal marketing campaign, to more slowly help neophytes come to understand the subtleties of mechanical watchmaking rather than trying to degrade their sense of self in order to convince them to buy this week’s offering. We’ll get fewer bubbles this way, but they won’t burst their wet mess all over the quarterly reports, either.
Without a reinstatement of a core philosophy that prioritizes meaningful horological achievements, we’re going to end up in a world of uninspiring watches traded as the coinage of social capital. The world needs that about as much as it needs another smooth jazz record.