PORSCHE DESIGN WATCHES PART I: THE 20TH CENTURY

Uniquely among watches associated with cars, this third entry in our series differs from Bugatti and Ferrari timepieces in that the automotive connection was, initially, only a shared family name. The roots of the watches have nothing to do with the automobiles per se: unlike car-makers’ joint ventures with watch companies, Porsche watches began as a purely horological effort conceived by what is known, for short, as “Porsche Design”.

Jumping ahead five decades, Porsche AG, the group that makes the cars, now owns the design studio that created the non-automotive products. It also manufactures the current Porsche Design watches, after three generations of the eponymous timepieces made by outside makers. To complicate matters, at one point the Porsche Design Studio owned one of the brands subcontracted to produce the watches. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

To understand the overall spirit of Porsche watches, it helps to know what gave birth to them in an era before formal car/watch tie-ins were common. This design think-tank was established in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1972 by Prof. Ferdinand Alexander “Butzi” Porsche (1935-2012), the grandson of Porsche founder Ferdinand Porsche, and designer of the Porsche 911. That alone is enough to ensure immortality in the annals of the automobile, but his ideas weren’t confined