Official watch partner of the Renault Sport Formula One™ Team, Bell & Ross celebrates the reopening of the French Grand Prix with its first presentation of a Vintage model from the collections linked to the partnership. To mark the return of Formula 1® to France, the BR V2-94 R.S.18 will be featuring a black rubber strap stamped with the French flag during the French Grand Prix.

In London this month, Vacheron Constantin unveiled Les Collectionneurs - a selling exhibition of 18 pocket watches and wristwatches dating from 1923 to 1969, and which have been fully restored and serviced by the Swiss house. Available at the Bond Street boutique for a limited period, each timepiece notably comes with a two-year guarantee – the same as for a modern Vacheron Constantin watch – and a certificate of authenticity.

The Bovet manufacture is not like any other. That’s a marketing slogan that every brand can agree with! It has become something of a cliché to claim uniqueness. So why should Bovet be any different?

On 22nd June 2018, Ricardo Guadalupe, CEO of Hublot next to Hublot Ambassadors, Richard Orlinski, the French sculptor and Artist, and Yannick Alléno, the three Michelin star Chef, officially inaugurated the Parisian Flagship, freshly renovated and located at the heart of the 1st arrondissement on the famous place Vendôme. « After Cannes and Saint-Tropez in 2017, we celebrate here in Paris – the first global city to welcome a Hublot Boutique in 2007 – the reopening of our flagship store. Albeit mature, France is an watchmaking market for which Hublot still has great expectations as exemplified by a new opening coming very soon! Hublot Loves France », said Ricardo Guadalupe.

Characterized by a typical English sartorial elegance, Royal Ascot is considered worldwide to be one of the most prestigious sporting events in the calendar. After celebrating its ten-year partnership with Ascot in 2016, Longines announced last week the renewal of its long-lasting association with the Berkshire racecourse. Under this agreement, the brand becomes an Official Partner of Ascot and continues its designation as Official Timekeeper and Watch. At Royal Ascot, the brand is also given an elevated profile, which includes stalls branding, on Wednesdays. 

If you frequent watch news sites you will have noticed a new member of the watch fraternity. Wrist hairs have become an essential accessory for watches, as vital as a crown or a strap. The wristshot, a popular variant of a selfie, has invaded blogs, Instagram feeds and even official watch adverts looking for some casual lifestyle branding. And with it come all those ugly little keratin stowaways.

Following the white and black models unveiled last year, the Grande Seconde by Jaquet Droz gets reinvented with new colors in an interpretation at once modern and alive, marrying contemporary materials with reinterpreted age-old finishes.

In 2005 the German town of Glashütte put out a tender looking for an innovative way to make use of one of the town centre's most historic buildings, the former German Watchmaking School. A year later, the documents establishing the "German Watch Museum Glashütte – Nicolas G. Hayek" Foundation were signed by the town of Glashütte and Glashütte Original. The idea was to set up a watch museum, with the town contributing its watch collection and Glashütte Original purchasing and restoring the former watchmaking school with the support of the Swatch Group. After two years of renovation work, the museum opened in 2008. Over the past ten years, more than 300,000 people from a wide variety of backgrounds have visited the museum, from groups of local schoolchildren to watch collectors from afar.

With his keen eye for young talent like Alexander Zverev, the world’s current #3 tennis player - who was #38 on the ATP Tour in 2016 when he joined the Richard Mille family - or Charles Leclerc, Alexis Pinturault, and so many others, Richard Mille has signed a partnership with Yuliya Levchenko. Yuliya will certainly find a place next to Mutaz Essa Barshim, her masculine counterpart and undisputed king of the discipline. On the field, she will leap for the gold wearing an RM 07-01 Automatic Ladies in Carbon TPT®.

Bell & Ross, in collaboration with Gaspard Horlogerie-Bijouterie, has participated in the sixth edition of the biennial offshore event in the South Pacific as the official timekeeper of the sailing race. With its 1.500 km long around the biggest lagoon in the world, the race started on Sunday June 17th from Nouméa, gathering a total of 24 monohulls and multihulls. The fastest anticlockwise sail around New Caledonia is passing through Cap N’Dua in the south and Grand Passage at the extreme north to eventually finish off Nouméa.

On June 16th, Jaeger-LeCoultre celebrated the opening of the Shanghai International Film Festival, tThis 21st edition coinciding with the 185th anniversary of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Manufacture.

The first collection that you worked on for Montblanc was the TimeWalker. We saw some new models again this year. How has the collection evolved over the past couple of years?
In effect 2017 was a seminal year for the launch of sport watches and we worked in detail to look into the history of Minerva to find links with motorsport and performance. An incredible exploration in timekeeping took place in Minerva during the first half of the 20th century with counters that were either tools to measure performance, in particular short time frames (from 1/5th of a second down to 1/100th of a second in 1936), or that were specific to particular sports, such rally, football, rowing and horse riding. Leveraging this unique heritage we created the concept of “spirit of racing” to support and inspire the relaunch and re-design of the TimeWalker collection.

Watchmaker of the oceans, Ulysse Nardin announces a partnership with Alex Caizergues, the first to surpass 100 km/h on the water by sail power. With an impressive list of achievements to his name across all board sports, the French kitesurfer currently holds the World Sailing Speed Kitesurfing record, with a run averaging 107.3 km/h, or 57.98 knots (over 500m). 

The big WorldTempus summer competition is back again this year with the same successful formula: 93 days of competition, from 21st June until 21st September, 1 question per day and one prize per day. 

At Baselworld in 2014, a journalist colleague asked me pointedly whether I thought that blue was the new black. True, blue was increasingly ubiquitous. Since then, at predictable intervals, I’ve seen various headlines and press releases claiming that brown or green are also the new black.