New Year, new you! New resolutions, new diet, new list of guilt before January’s even in full swing… As if we’re not already bombarded enough with newness, the turn of the year just rubs it in with even more anxiety-inducing FOMO.

Well, for those already in the market for something serious in the watch department, we’re here to administer your horological antidote. A restorative dose of “old” in every sense. Ancient almost, when you remember that Vacheron Constantin is Switzerland’s longest-running watchmaker, in constant production for a solid 265 years. That’s weathering French as well as Russian revolutions, Napoleonic wars, two world wars, several financial crashes and great depressions. Even Switzerland’s very own crash during the 1970s, when quartz technology nearly wiped out Vacheron Constantin’s own breed of exquisite hand-craftsmanship.

Against the backdrop of all that history, Geneva’s favourite son has not only survived, but done so with a particularly Latin panache, in contrast to the more classical reserve exacted by its contemporaries up in the valleys of the Jura. It’s taken the odd diversification into textiles, cherry brandy, plus the then unheard-of adoption of industrial mechanisation in 1839, but Vacheron Constantin has never lost its aesthetic spark – no more than its mechanical ingenuity.

And that spark continues to light up a canon of “shaped” classics – many now more than 100 years old – that are still to be found in the catalogue. Still as fresh and, dare we say it, fun as they were back when all hell was raining down on the Western Front.

Back when Cartier was fast-forging its grande dame status for the experimental “form” watch (admittedly bolstered by its origins in haute jewellery) Vacheron Constantin was going toe-to-toe with a menagerie of “tonneau”, or barrel-shaped cases. Found under the Malte collection in today’s line-up, the many stretched and crimped curves that played out from 1914 to 1919 have settled into one pure and timeless design.

Come the Jazz Age and the American influence, an asymmetric Cushion case in 1921, with the crown “twisted” to one o’clock captured the free spirit of the era – quite rightly revived in Vacheron Constantin’s modern age, and as rakish as ever.

The advent of the wrist-worn chronograph in the 1930s had the great and the good of Switzerland – Breitling, Zenith and Heuer notable among them – making extraordinary strides in minaturising ever-more precise stopwatch mechanics into 36mm of metal. But trust Vacheron Costantin to bring harmony to a notoriously “instrumental” complication. Harmony being the name taken for the current-day spin on the brand’s rounded-out, twin-counter chrono’ of the late-1920s.

It’s certainly refreshing, and reassuring, that brands such as Vacheron Constantin are ploughing a furrow of such overt anti-obsolescence, in an era so beholden to the next next. Even a watch like the Quai de l’Ile, which distils a heritage into modern form rather than revives a specific classic, has ageless heirloom material baked right in.

If you’re going to make any new year’s resolution when it comes to your spending habits, make it something like this. It’ll keep itself.