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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Opus 8!
New Models

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Opus 8!

Thursday, 03 April 2008
By Florence Noël
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Florence Noël

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3 min read

Harry Winston reveals Opus 8, a watch that displays time on demand and in a very unusual way.

It’s now something of a tradition at Baselworld. Each year, Harry Winston sets out to amaze the world’s media with its Opus: unique timepieces, each one masterminded by inspired watchmakers who give free rein to their imagination.

Such a genius has again risen to the challenge but, for once, he is neither a born-and-bred watchmaker nor an old hand in the branch. Frédéric Garinaud’s original career choice was in the military until he moved from his native south-west France to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2000. Here, he joined Audemars Piguet where he took the head of the technical bureau, doing project management for Renaud & Papi.

This would prove a decisive encounter that propelled this glutton for creativity into the fascinating world of fine watchmaking. Soon he was dreaming of applying innovations in fields such as design, ecology or microelectronics to the mechanical objects that are watches. His aim: to inspire emotion. “I don’t know the first thing about watchmaking,” he confessed. “I just want to feel something when I look at the object on my wrist.”

Frédéric Garinaud found these emotions in his boyhood memories, from 1970s TV shows to disco and the Star Wars saga. Taking these as his references, he imagined fabulously inventive models packed with audacious technology. In the space of just a few years, he won both his peers’ respect and his nickname: “the magician.”

Time is displayed not by hands but as segments.
Frédéric Garinaud
Pin-board wizard

Fine Watchmaking is, for Frédéric Garinaud, one big playing field. And play is at the heart of the Opus 8 concept, as the watchmaker-magician took the idea for his creation from one of his daughter’s favourite toys: the pin-art board which produces a three-dimensional impression of the hand when pressed down on the hundreds of tiny pins.

Add a dose of “Magnum” and a spot of “Back to the Future” and you get the Opus 8 by Frédéric Garinaud. A hand-wound mechanical watch that displays digital hours and minutes on demand.

How? “The base movement is mounted upside-down at 180°. Time is displayed not by hands but as segments,” Frédéric Garinaud explains. In greater detail then, a screen supports mobile and fixed segments below which there is a disc, driven by the movement which rotates independently and in real-time. As soon as the mechanism is activated, using a slide-piece on the right of the case, this screen is lowered and only the segments opposite the hour remain raised, displaying time for five seconds, before returning to a flat position.

So much for the ultra-sophisticated technology, what about the display? Original, to say the least, with the hour shown using the Anglo-Saxon AM and PM system while an arrow points to five-minute increments. The overall design is resolutely Seventies, a creative choice but one that was also imposed by the fact the movement is mounted upside-down to incorporate the slide-piece on the right of the case.

It took ten months in all to conceive a timepiece that is unique on more than one score. The first deliveries are already scheduled for next month.

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