BEST OF BASEL: WELL, IT WASN’T THE SAUSAGES
You ever watch those YouTube videos where children, invariably male children, find it funny to kick themselves or each other in the balls? As if they think the resulting comedic effect will far more than compensate for the physical pain. Well, it doesn’t and that, my friends, precisely encapsulates my visit to the Baselworld sausage stand each year where, for the price of 8.50 Swiss francs (if you want to sit down and eat that same sausage accompanied by a side of rosti at the official Baselworld restaurant, the price goes up to 29.50 Swiss francs) I get a piece of lukewarm processed meat, with a slab of stale bread of the sort they feed prisoners in an Alexandre Dumas novel — a culinary experience so self-flagellating that I realise I have just analogously kicked myself in the balls. It was particularly true this year when a visit to the sausage stand gave me two days of severe food poisoning, and in the resulting hallucinatory state, I dreamed that the MCH Group had hired North Korean agents to infect my bratwurst with the Ebola virus.
That having been said, the watches this year at Baselworld, or shall I call it Baselworld Lite — same price, fewer calories — were very good. Which has nothing to do with the erroneous attribution of the resulting “good business at Baselworld” to Baselworld, as their newsletter would have you believe, but everything to do with the strength of the brands themselves. So, while my perspectives on Baselworld are well documented and with this hackneyed trade show it’s now become the anachronistic old man at the disco, still grooving to a beat only he hears as the lights come on to reveal everyone has gone home, I’d like to turn the focus instead to the wonderful brands and great watches that represent the latest releases in the 2019 watch year.
BVLGARI OCTO FINISSIMO CHRONOGRAPH GMT AUTOMATIC
“The thing is this,” says Bvlgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin, “the entire watch industry is riding on a kind of retro trend. But the point is, if you only remake the past as the vast majority of our competitors are [doing], you begin to stand still. Ask yourself: If this was the attitude in the ’70s when brands were compelled to innovate in response to the Quartz Crisis, to come
