A Time for Women
With its 2017 Da Vinci collection, luxury watch IWC Schaffhausen gives greater attention to women who desire perfection and precision in their timepieces
hen the Swiss luxury watch IWC Schaffhausen started in 1868, it first concentrated on the male market. With a clear focus on technology and development, it immediately gained a solid reputation as a finely crafted and precise timepiece for men, staying true to its early slogan “Engineered for Men.” But times do change, and markets shift. Women began wearing their watches as brooches or pendants hung around the neck. So the manufacture, founded by the American Florentine Ariosto Jones, created designs with more embellishments and ornaments that pleased this clientele. The development of the women’s market proceeded with certainty, albeit with caution. As the former CEO of IWC, Georges Kern, was quoted as saying: “We are a male brand and will remain one.” Now the head of the digital and marketing divisions of watchmaking of Richemont Group, the umbrella organisation of several luxury brands including IWC, he however observed that women would also buy the men’s watches. “But there has been a natural ergonomic limitation,” he noted. As the years passed, the female market started to show big promise and IWC began to include more models for the women’s segment in its series like the Da Vinci, Pilot’s Watches, and Portofino.
2017 is an exceptional year for IWC women’s watches. In January, at the Salon Institute de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, IWC launched two models created especially for women: the Da Vinci Automatic 36 and the Da Vinci Automatic Moon Phase 36. In the summer, it introduced the 2017 Da Vinci collection to Southeast Asia via an exhibition, which served as IWC Schaffhausen’s first official launch in the region.
Curated by David Seyffer, museum curator of IWC, and designed by IWC’s in-house team of architects and designers, the Da Vinci exhibition booth was set up at the Atrium of the high-end Siam Paragon in Bangkok, Thailand. The style inspiration was an Italian palazzo, tweaked with a touch of contemporary elegance, and featured the collection’s “Flower of Life” motif—a geometrical figure within a circle, composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles arranged to form a flower-like pattern with a six-fold symmetry like a hexagon. This symbol of creation, ever a subject of interest to the collection’s inspiration, the genius Leonardo Da Vinci, is engraved on the casebacks of the new models with a case diametre of 36mm.
Alongside the latest novelties of the 2017 Da Vinci collection, the exhibition also brought for the first time to Southeast Asia nine vintage watches from IWC’s archives. These were the Savonnette Lady’s Pocket Watch (1914), the Lady’s wristwatches (1967 and 1976), the Da Vinci Line (1979), the Da Vinci Lady Chronograph (1995), the Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Prototype (1999), the Da Vinci SL-Automatic Prototype (1998), the Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar Rattrapante (2003), and the Da Vinci Chronograph Edition Laureus Sport for Good Foundation Prototype (2008).
For this gathering of icons, IWC chose one of its iconic brand ambassadors, celebrity supermodel Karolina Kurkova. A believer in the brand for five years now, Kurkova charmed everyone not just with her statuesque elegance and impeccable style, but her unexpected down-to-earth charm. She wore her Da Vinci watch with as much pride as she did her wife and mother’s heart (“I prefer to do things by myself as this keeps me grounded,” she told a group of journalists from all over the region). And on the collection, she said, “Da Vinci is taking us back in time via an amazing journey. It is a great brand with incredible precision, timeless, and iconic.”
On the busy day of media interviews and exhibition launch, Kurkova chose to wear first the Da Vinci Automatic 36 with the blue face and then the Da Vinci Automatic Moon Phase 36 with the blue strap in the evening. “I am very much into blues right now,” shared the hands-on mum. “But I also like the red gold, good for the summer.” The variety of models of the 2017 Da Vinci collection suits Kurkova, who added that she chooses her watch according to the mood she is in.