BACK IN BLACK
Black cases used to indicate that a watch was cheap. Not any more...
How important is colour when you are buying a car? If you have enough interest in the things to read a car magazine, colour probably isn’t top of your priority list. When someone starts by asking what colour a car is, you know that they are unlikely to follow it up with questions about horsepower and diffs. The same goes for watches. If you ask a collector what that they are looking for at a watch auction, they never say “Red ones.”
That’s not to say that colour isn’t important. And the coolest colour is black. Imagine David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider driving a white Trans Am. It just wouldn’t have worked. What once had been the functional colour of Model T Fords, typewriters and Bakelite telephones, morphed into the bad boy’s colour of choice for cars from Batmobiles to AMG Blacks.
The watch industry has been slow to get itself on the black-wagon – not surprising considering that the powerhouse is still Switzerland, a country that does not like things to change too quickly. Until recently, black was more likely to be the functional colour of a lower-priced watch, not an effort to be stylish. But suddenly there’s lots of stealth-fighter-grade blacked-out watches.
One man who can lay a strong claim to bringing black magic to the watch market is George Bamford, grandson of the digger magnate Joseph Cyril Bamford. London-based Bamford first made a name early this century doing after-market customisations of luxury watches. His signature was expertly blacking out watches that were normally stainless steel or gold. The punters couldn’t get enough of them and now Bamford does in-house customisations for brands like TAG Heuer and Zenith, as well as selling his own watches.
If you worry that a black dial on a black case will make your watch less legible, don’t. The quality of luminous material is now so good that you can easily tell the time in the dark. Blacked out watches come at all prices ranges, in all kinds of styles. So colour might not be the first thing you think about – b but you have to admit that these look damn good in black.