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Christopher Ward cannot be stopped.
The brand keeps raising the bar for what can be done at various price points in the watch industry, continually outdoing itself with each seemingly impossible watch it introduces.
Christopher Ward‘s latest internet-breaker is the Twelve Xander, a special limited-edition of the Twelve X that elevates the watch’s standard-raising skeletonized finishing to a whole new level.
Which color would you like your Twelve X? All of them.Christopher Ward
Masterpiece
The new Twelve Xander is a collab with Chris Alexander, better known as The Dial Artist, an artist known for his custom hand-painted watch dials.
CW commissioned a custom, pop art take of its titanium Twelve X from “Xander,” and he responded, as the kids say, by doing the most.
There are 150 watches in this limited run, and each one features a total of eight hand-painted components. That may not sound like a lot, but those components include the dial ring, the main bridges on both sides of the skeletonized movement and the rotor, completely transforming the look of the watch.
The bridges and dial ring are some of the components hand-painted by The Dial Artist.Christopher Ward
The effect looks like Alexander simply splattered multiple colors of paint on the watch, Jackson Pollock-style, but the truth is far more complicated. Each hand-painted piece required multiple steps of priming, airbrushing, hand-painting and hand-finishing. And with 150 watches to paint, that means Alexander completed this process on a total of 1,200 individual mini masterpieces, totaling 900 hours of painstaking work.
The result is quite mesmerizing. The watch is colorful and chaotic, with the artist imitating “action paintings” of the 1960s and their illusion of fast-paced movement.
The pop-art style takes inspiration from 1960s action paintings.Christopher Ward
The style is a great fit for the Twelve X, a watch powered by a skeletonized version of Christopher Ward’s original in-house movement, the COSC-certified Calibre CW-001 automatic, which looks striking with its twin mainspring barrels packing an impressive five days of power reserve.
The hand-painted dial ring contains the minute track and indices, which, like the hands, are filled with Super-LumiNova Grade X1 BL C1, with a solid ceramic lume Globolight marker at 12:00 for an impressive nighttime signature.
The 41mm x 12.3mm Grade 2 titanium case with Grade 5 titanium twelve-sided bezel remains unchanged, and it still features box sapphire crystals front and back. The watch comes on either the Twelve X’s usual integrated Grade 2 titanium bracelet featuring an on-the-fly microadjustable butterfly clasp, or on an all-new “Pure White” integrated rubber strap with a titanium pin buckle. Both the strap and bracelet work with the case’s integrated quick-change system.
All 150 watches feature eight hand-painted components requiring a total of 900 hours of work.Christopher Ward
Availability and pricing
Rainbow watches continue to be the ultimate statement watch, with blinged-out versions from Rolex, Hublot, Audemars Piguet and others going for unfathomable prices. CW’s unique take on a rainbow style doesn’t feature any gemstones like those watches, but I think the hand-painted artwork covering the watch more than makes up for that.
The Twelve Xander is limited to just 150 pieces, with each one differing slightly due to their handmade nature. On the rubber strap, which is the look I actually prefer in this case, the watch goes for $5,995. On the bracelet, it costs $6,515. Both prices represent an increase of $620 over the standard Twelve X (Ti), which I think is more than fair.
The Twelve Xander is available to preorder now on Christopher Ward’s website, with deliveries expected in mid-August.
Johnny Brayson is an editor at Gear Patrol mostly covering watches. He enjoys watches that are packed with blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em details and believes nearly every watch could stand to be a tad smaller.
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