After reading an article in this months Financial Times How To Spend It magazine I felt compelled to share with you the gist of an article that you will soon be able to read in it's entirety online.How To Spend It is a monthly magazine supplement inserted free into the FT and is filled with consumer items that even 99% of their affluent readership probably cannot afford.
So this aspirational, hideously bourgeois magazine is filled with features and adverts for big ticket items like Swiss watches. Imagine my surprise when flicking through the supplement to come across an article by Nick Foulkes on the people and companies that are making (and have been since the 1970's) ludicrously priced mechanical timepieces that mimic the appearance of their digital counterparts.
Take the De Grisogono Meccanico dG in Titanium (top picture) above priced at over £100,000 or the Cabestan Winch (middle picture) with a whopping £178,000 tag. These watches
are undeniably beautiful in both their aesthetic appeal and complexity of design and engineering but one has to wonder at the point of such frivolity. Even Nick Foulkes admits that the concept is "Almost perverse".My favourite has to be the Harry Winston Opus 8 (lower picture) that uses mechanics to mimic the pixel movement in an LCD screen. Whatever the folly I must doff my cap to the maniacal, mechanical genius of the horologist.
If you want to read the article then the digital edition of How To Spend It should be available from the FT website soon. In the meantime you can read previous editions for free by clicking here.
Citizen Vain
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