This week, the Palexpo facility in Geneva, Switzerland, will become the center of the watch world for the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, or SIHH, a luxury watch show rivaled only by BaselWorld in relevance and prestige. We’ve got a team on the ground, there to bring you the most exciting releases. Follow our coverage here, and also be sure to check out Instagram. We’ll be posting to our feed throughout the week.
Key Specs
Price: $75,100
Availability: TBD
Movement: L094.1
Winding: Manual
Case Diameter: 39.9mm
Case Thickness: 10.6mm
Power Reserve: 42 hours
Unique Features: Jumping seconds complication; oversized sub-seconds dial
Upshot: While collectors’ appetites for different dial colors grows steadily every day, there’s still something to be said for a sharp watch with a black face. For the first time since its introduction in 2016, A. Lange & Söhne’s Richard Lange Jumping Seconds will be offered with a black dial in a white gold case. It’s the kind of update where a small change has a massive impact.
Who It’s For: In any of its three iterations, the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds is the kind of watch tailor-made for people who don’t like sober, conventional timepieces. There’s its quartz-like movement of its prominently featured seconds hand, front and center. It’s made possible by a jumping seconds (or deadbeat seconds) mechanism, and it occupies the biggest of the three interlocking subdials on the face.
First Take: There’s nothing not to like about this watch. There’s a quirkiness to it that’s incredibly appealing — and that lies in the undeniable utility of those quirks. The jumping seconds mechanism makes the watch easy to read literally down to the second, and it also boasts a handy Zero Reset function. Whenever the crown is pulled out, the seconds hand automatically advances to zero, so this watch is incredibly easy to set. Plus, the Lange design team took advantage of a small triagular space on the lower half of the watch to place a small power-reserve indicator. It’s normally red, but it becomes white 10 hours before the watch needs to be re-wound. It’s a feature that would be welcome on other hand-wound watches, too.
Insight: While Lange didn’t reveal a brand spanking new model this year, it did give us some worthy aesthetic updates to its already stellar catalog of watches. And that’s OK. We know that this isn’t a company that rests on its laurels. So while we wait for Team Lange to blow our minds with another breathtaking innovation like, say, last year’s Triple Split, at least we have some highly thoughtful new editions to tide us over.
