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A tale in Dubai city
Events

A tale in Dubai city

Sunday, 19 November 2017
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Christophe Roulet
Editor-in-chief, HH Journal

“The desire to learn is the key to understanding.”

“Thirty years in journalism are a powerful stimulant for curiosity”.

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4 min read

As watchmakers go head-to-head to see not who makes the best products, but who tells the best stories, those brands with an authentic history have the most interesting tales to tell. So make yourself comfortable, because it’s storytime at Dubai Watch Week.

Since the reality check of crisis, watch brands have come to the realisation that they need to shore up their foundations, and have called in their communication departments as part of the bid to boost troops’ morale and, more to the point, recapture the minds of customers left cold by past excesses. For many, it would seem, the way to soften a hardened heart, and burnish brand credentials at the same time, is through a good story – told more or less skilfully when recounting real-life adventures, and with more or less sincerity when spinning a yarn. If you don’t have the ultimate watch, you can at least try the power of persuasion. Like Homer and his Trojan epic, brands aim to keep us enthralled with tales of wondrous deeds. Yet while we are all said to be equal in the eyes of the law, where history is concerned it’s a different… story!

It’s a fact confirmed at Dubai Watch Week, currently taking place in the shadow of the twin Emirates Towers, where almost every presentation becomes a reminder of how tightly woven the brand is in the fabric of watchmaking, and with archives to prove it. The door to centuries of tradition is thrown wide open, enticing us in on the first leg of this horological odyssey. Thus audiences were treated to a vivid account of the life of Heinrich Moser, founding father of H. Moser & Cie, and his bold journey to the St Petersburg of Tsar Nicolas I, where he rose to fame and fortune. A story left hanging in 1917 when Moser was forced out of Russia by the October Revolution, until 2015 when the brand was brought back to life by the very people singing its praises in Dubai. In the heat of the action, no-one thought to mention a crucial episode in its history under Straumann – a specialist in dental implants that revived the brand in 2006. An entire decade swept under the carpet in order to keep the narrative flowing. At Ferdinand Berthoud, named after the renowned eighteenth-century watchmaker, we heard adventures from the high seas and the days when sailors relied on marine chronometers to calculate longitude; a means of driving home the point that after two hundred years by the wayside, the first watch to have seen daylight under the Berthoud name in the twenty-first century is heir to this pioneering age. Two mirrors reflecting to infinity.

There is no shortage of material, with 1,400 historic pieces in the brand’s collection and 350 linear metres of archives.
Christian Selmoni

Vacheron Constantin has been manufacturing timepieces without interruption since 1755. As the oldest continuously producing watchmaker, it takes its history seriously yet doesn’t feel obliged to force it down our throats. In fact its Dubai preview of two watches that will be shown at Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva next January – a Traditionnelle Complete Calendar in the Excellence Platine collection and an Overseas Dual Time fitted with a new in-house movement – made no mention of these two and a half centuries of history. Christian Selmoni, director of Style & Heritage at Vacheron Constantin, believes there is nothing to be gained from mixing everything up, even if there is no shortage of material, considering the 1,400 or so historic pieces in its collection and archives that take up 350 metres of shelf space. “My new role at Vacheron Constantin is to reveal this immense heritage, and to present it to our customers who are able to appreciate the historic background of the watches we show them, but also to our own staff,” he declares. “It’s my job to fuel creation with everything the Manufacture’s past can teach us.”

Christian Selmoni, director of Style & Heritage © Vacheron Constantin
Christian Selmoni, director of Style & Heritage © Vacheron Constantin

Christian Selmoni can expect to be kept busy, given that Vacheron Constantin is among those names most entitled to mine the rich seam of its past, but hasn’t fully exploited this potential yet. The firm is currently embarked on a long-term project with two laboratories at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne to digitize its entire archives, including many handwritten letters. The result will be both a virtual museum in three dimensions and a retrievable system enabling users to share this seemingly fathomless body of documents. “Our work so far has been primarily to put the archives into chronological order for the best possible traceability of Vacheron Constantin watches,” Christian Selmoni explains. “It’s not unlike a catalogue raisonné, with the difference that the digital tools we’re developing will enable us to go much further.” Because in among the fantasies and fables, there is always a (true) story waiting to be told…

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