Omega
Fantasy Hours: Andrew Grima’s About Time for Omega
Omega
Fantasy Hours: Andrew Grima’s About Time for Omega
In 1969, Omega commissioned London-based artist jeweler Andrew Grima to design a collection of watches, About Time, that even today remain unsurpassed for their ingenuity, audacity and powerful, sculptural design. Though Mr Grima was already acknowledged as a maverick of modern jewelry design, and was arguably the most innovative designer of his generation with a wildly fashionable shop at No. 80 Jermyn Street and a Royal Warrant, he had never previously designed a watch. As the jeweler to The Queen, Princess Margaret and Jackie O said: “If you need to know the time, you ask your chauffeur.”
“The way Andrew worked was to incessantly sketch an endless flow of ideas on the back of envelopes, scraps of paper, hotel stationery or bar mats,” says Jojo Grima as she opens folders from her late husband’s archive showing the great man’s rough sketches for About Time.
Jojo also owns all of the beautifully described illustrations of the collection of 55 watches and 31 pieces of jewelry, as well as some of the wooden models Grima took to Omega in 1969. As he told journalist Shirley Conran in 1970: “The first time I went to Switzerland with the experimental wooden models, I was greeted with dead silence, then a series of polite questions. The Swiss are not inclined to go mad.
The uniting factor in each of the unique watch designs was the concept of seeing time through gemstones. Each stone dictated the design of the watch and, as Anna Motson wrote in her essay ‘Watches as Jewels’ that appeared in The Saturday Book in 1971, “The stone cutters were called on to cut precious and semi-precious stones in shapes and sizes that had never before been attempted, and the whole project faced Grima’s own craftsmen with the highest test of their skill ever encountered.”
Standalone
“My father was adamant that the Omega logo did not appear on his watch faces and he also refused to entertain numerals,” says Andrew and Jojo Grima’s daughter Francesca, who today designs under her own marque as well as with her mother on contemporary Grima pieces. Grima allowed his imagination to run wild designing watches as rings, pendants, pocket watches and clips. Even the pieces worn conventionally as a bracelet were anything but. Tornado sets a rutilated quartz almond-shaped glass in a “springy bangle” of polished yellow-gold wire spattered with diamond strips. Carré is pure Grima: an aquamarine crystal face set on a bracelet of square, textured gold and diamond set platinum blocks not dissimilar to crazy paving.