With the watchmaker’s latest launch, could a whole watch collection really be forfeited for just one timepiece?
So pressing is the spirit of accumulation these days that it can often go unchecked that for most consumers of luxury watches, there may only ever be one. The one. Obsessions with collecting, the acceptable face of extreme consumption, have drowned out this gentle truth, instead ordaining that sentient beings should have watch wardrobes, neatly organised by brand, colour, function or whatever feeds our compulsions. The fallacy – so quickly exposed in other areas – being that size and appreciation are somehow inextricably linked.
Most people I come across have either one “proper” watch, or aspire to own one – typically one in particular. I met a fellow not long ago who was wearing a TAG Heuer Formula 1 he’d bought 25 years previously for a few hundred pounds as a reward for ‘making a bit of money’. To him, the watch had lost none of its significance over time – if anything, it had acquired more. Wonderful.
The TAG Heuer Professional 200 is the ultimate sport-chic watch
The example of TAG Heuer as the ‘if there were only ever one’ is apposite. A few years ago and under the leadership of one of the industry’s few contemporary giants, Jean-Claude Biver, TAG Heuer reintroduced the brilliant 1990s slogan ‘Don’t crack under pressure’, and with it the sense that a TAG Heuer should be the first luxury watch of the aspirant careerist.
While there was fresh momentum behind the idea, it was not new. It picked up on the visions of the great Jack Heuer, great-grandson of the company’s founder, who in the 1960s took the family business by the horns and set about creating watches that folded design, function, quality, affordability and dreams of success into a few square centimetres of wrist real estate. His Carrera, introduced in 1963, even had a name that meant “career”.
This latest TAG Heuer watch is built for activities from extreme adventures to everyday wear
Into this picture today comes the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 200, a watch designed for all seasons, perhaps as no other is. It too has a name weighted with its creator’s convictions – on land, at sea and in multiples of 100, it’s willing us to believe it can be our one watch.
And maybe it can. In the simplest terms, the Aquaracer Professional 200 is a “go-anywhere” watch, as the vernacular increasingly has it. Those models introduced on debut are all in hearty, protean steel, from the 40mm automatics to the 30mm diamond-set quartz pieces, each described by TAG Heuer as a ‘luxury tool watch’.
Indeed, word from TAG Heuer’s boffins is that their watch is engineered to emerge from the water and keep rising until it reaches the peaks of the snowiest of mountains. It’s a swimmer rather than a diver, they say – the 200 in the name signposts water resistance to the depths of the same meterage, which in real terms means leisurely Scuba-ing rather than long stays in the abyss. For that practice, TAG Heuer commends the 200’s meatier sibling, the Aquaracer Professional 300, which is – I’m reliably informed – much more at home amid the interminable blankness of the deep, and from which the 200 derives.
To drive home the point, the Swiss watchmaker is peppering the airwaves with stories of the watches worn by professional practitioners in the sports of speed flying, ice skiing and ice climbing, daring mountain-side pursuits that may be more familiar to the youth of today than they are to this seasoned self-preservationist.
On my wrist earlier this spring, surrounded by the elevated comforts of a Mayfair townhouse rather than the perils of a vertiginous wall of ice, the watch’s easy proportions and hushed colour palette seemed just as at home. At 40mm and with gradient grey or blue dials, the automatics are commendably all-round. The comparison, in the interests of familiarity, would be to the SUV that’s used as the family runabout.
Which isn’t as disposable a comment as it might appear. The roots of the Aquaracer Professional 200 lie in the Heuer Reference 844, a piece introduced in 1978 by a desperate Jack Heuer. That decade, Jack had watched on helpless as his collection of modernist mechanical chronographs had been left for dust by the electronic whirlwind now known as the quartz crisis. Much like the car manufacturers who turned to SUVs 15-odd years ago, he needed a hit to revive his company’s fortunes. And he hoped the Reference 844 would be it.
The timepiece has been put through its paces by professionals
It wasn’t. But it wasn’t in vain, either. Because Reference 844 set a template that TAG Heuer – as it became following a buyout by Techniques d’Avant Garde in 1985, the TAG of today’s brand name – has gone back to numerous times since. The first time Jack Heuer revisited the design was for the 1000 Series, inspired by a conversation he had had at a sporting goods trade show in 1979, a model that would sustain the company for almost 20 years.
In 2004, it was reborn as the Aquaracer, a series of sports watches that promised six features, namely a uni-directional rotating bezel, a screw-down crown, water resistance to at least 200 metres, luminous markings, a sapphire crystal, and a double safety clasp on the bracelet. That half-dozen are now the bones of the modern manual of performance-watch design – and of the Aquaracer Professional family.
The paradox with the Aquaracer, whether in this guise or any before it, is that despite being a huge commercial success, and despite having distinct characteristics of its own (chiefly its 12-sided bezel and lined dial), it has never been viewed with such unquestioning affection as TAG Heuer’s more celebrated designs, particularly the Carrera and the square-cased Monaco.
This, surely, is more a consequence of its genealogy than its design. It has no Swinging Sixties story to tell, and no association with a blue-eyed star of the silver screen to leverage. The Monaco is seldom referred to without mention of Steve McQueen. The Aquaracer has no such tonic, and yet it remains an enormously serviceable wristwatch.
Which is why for many, the Aquaracer Professional 200 will – and should – be the one. And how collected it will make them appear.
From £1,600; tagheuer.com
