One of the most beautiful new watches to emerge this spring doesn’t actually look very new at all. It’s the luxury fake Patek Philippe reference 5172G-010, a white-gold, hand-wound chronograph with a gorgeous salmon dial. It’s a fresh model that borrows some of 1:1 replica Patek Philippe’s most venerated design moves.
In fact, when I first saw the watch, I thought I knew it already. The new perfect replica Patek Philippe 5172G almost teases the wearer with a sense of déjà vu: the protruding “box” crystal, syringe hands, and stepped bezel and lugs look ripped from the pages of vintage Patek catalogues. As Swiss made fake Patek Philippe president Thierry Stern explains, “It looks like it is from the past, but it is made for the present,” underscoring the push at the company to update its iconic design history for a new customer. At Patek, this sort of watchmaking is known as a “vintage contemporary.”
Get used to hearing the term. Across the watch world, brands – and customers – are embracing a rather antique sensibility. As in fashion, watchmaking in the noughties was defined by absurd sizes and baroque design features. But the pendulum always swings back. At the time, I remember the late Luigi “Gino” Macaluso, the then owner of Girard-Perregaux, predicting that the stylish European customer would soon be clamouring to buy simple, time-only AAA quality replica watches that measured around 36mm across – or about the size of any fine mid-century timepiece.
He was right: in the years that followed, case diameters shrank and got slimmer. The straightforward beauty of a three-hand watch face snapped into sharp focus, too. One of the absolute hottest 1:1 fake watches right now is the aptly named Philippe Dufour Simplicity. Dufour has been crafting a handful of the clean, time-only design each year for the past two decades. In the early days, you could buy one for around £26,000. In recent years, several Simplicities have gone for more than £750,000 at auction.
Such is the cult of the watch world today that brands can create more hype around recognisable old super clone watch components than around new designs. Take Vacheron Constantin’s cornes de vache (cow horns) lugs, which were exhumed from the Swiss brand’s archives and reintroduced in the middle of the last decade. I remember vintage-watch enthusiasts describing them – the lugs, not just the replica watches for sale – as if they were explaining a Michelangelo fresco. My favourite encomium came from the Hodinkee website, which called them “stunning, expressive, and masterful.” Which might seem silly, but it indicates something great: that we’re in a golden age of horological literacy, where a close appreciation of watch-making history feels more interesting than any new technological leap.
This nostalgia kick has also led to closer inspection of company archives, and brands with a rich back catalogue have been mining a fecund seam of heritage. Some have updated vintage models with modern materials and movements. Personally, I was very happy to see the 2020 return of Swiss movement fake Breitling’s AVI model in an almost museum-quality revival supervised by Breitling fundamentalist Fred Mandelbaum, whose pitch-perfect retreads have been a welcome feature of the brand’s rebirth. Over at top copy Omega, the dynamic Raynald Aeschlimann has also redeployed the brand’s classics masterfully. I’ve always loved the solid-gold “Nixon-spec” Speedmaster, issued to celebrate the moon landing in 1969. With its revival half a century later, it features such historically correct touches as an oxblood bezel and onyx hour markers – but with a movement that meets exacting new modern standards. Meanwhile, at cheap replica Cartier UK, Cyrille Vigneron has brought the brand’s watchmaking firmly back into the conversation by revisiting such Art Deco classics as the Tank Chinoise, which will return this year with a brand-new dial that nods to ancient Chinese design.
At a time when art and fashion are chasing innovations in the metaverse, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the excitement around neo-vintage timepieces that incorporate historic-artistic touches. The Patek Philippe 5172G fake online UK might look familiar, but it actually reflects a radical creative path: the most revolutionary way forwards in watchmaking can be found by looking backwards.
