Blancpain
Time to Move: Blancpain 2019
Blancpain Air Command
Marc you can imagine is well-placed to know and sitting on his wrist as he speaks to me, Nick Foulkes and Ken Kessler, is the most perfect condition example of the Air Command in existence. What is incredible is later when I post side-by-side images of the vintage watch beside the new 500-piece re-issue, viewers and even I will be perplexed as to which watch is which. Hayek laughs when I tell him this and states, “The idea was to come up with a watch that was incredibly faithful in appearance but was actually an example of the brand and the SWATCH Group’s most advanced technology.”
OK just to get this out of the way so we can get to the good stuff, the way you tell the old and new watch apart is like this. The old one has the wide uneven pusher spacing that is the hallmark of the Valjoux 222, and it has thin crown, a domed plexiglass crystal, smaller Arabic markers and wider spacing between the tachymeter and the edge of the dial. The new watch has a thicker crown, the word Flyback on the dial though both movements perform this function, even pusher spacing and amusingly even darker markers on the dial, hands and bezel which is what threw people the first time. And the color of these markers meant to evoke aged vintage radium works so perfectly that at least half the people looking at images on Instagram misidentified this as the vintage watch. While there are some pundits with misgivings about the use of vintage colored lume, honestly since the only function of a mechanical watch is to give you pleasure, much like the people who eschew special sauce on their burgers I say this is no place for puritanism. Want to evoke old world cool or slather your Double-Double Animal Style I says hellz to the yeah. Go for it, lets suck the marrow out of life and maximize our enjoyment of everything in it. Including watches. Especially watches.
On the subject of badass technical innovation lets start with the bezel of the new Air Command that features a ceramic insert and luminous markers. But it’s the movement of the watch that is the true technical powerhouse here. The F388B is an integrated automatic vertical clutch column wheel operated chronograph movement (Frederic Piguet which is now Blancpain’s in-house movement manufacture pioneered this style of movement all the way back in 1987 with the 1185) The movement beats at 5 Hertz or 36,0000 vibrations, good for dividing time to 1/10th of a second. There have been some critics that have gotten their panties in a bunch over the rose gold propeller shaped rotor on the back of the watch even pointing out that in the ’50s the jet engine had largely taken over as the primary means of propulsion in aviation but these are people that will never understand the wonder of melting cheese onto a steaming heap of salted French fries then slathering said golden concupiscent unctuousness with special sauce. Because watches as I explained are about maximizing your pleasure in life and the Air Command maximizes it to the highest realm possible.