If you close your eyes and picture a wristwatch, you’ll likely imagine something circular and flat, with 12 numbers and two, or maybe three, hands. The traditional watch is a platonic ideal emphatically lodged in the modern psyche. Or as Mr Martin Frei, designer and co-founder at the independent watchmaker Urwerk, puts it: “It’s a pictogram ingrained in the matrix – something that society wants you to understand from childhood onwards.”

By my conservative estimates, based on the highly scientific data-gathering method of spending hours of my life scrolling through Instagram, in a single year there are millions of pictures of watches shared worldwide. Some of them are fantastic, shot with professional-grade kit and lovingly photoshopped; some are just a well-timed snap on an iPhone. They all have one thing in common though: despite technically existing forever (or at least until Meta and Apple and Google are distant memories), every Instagram post is fleeting. Double-tap, scroll, scroll, scroll – here today, forgotten tomorrow.

Here are two heavyweights of the watchmaking world – IWC Schaffhausen and Panerai – that have recently given us something quite unexpected, under the guise of their most famous and immediately recognisable designs. Why are these watches so unusual, and what makes them stand out? Allow me to explain.

You might have gleaned over the last few months that people are pretty excited about the H08, a new watch collection launched by Hermès in April. We certainly were; so much so that I described it as the stand-out watch of the year thus far, and six months later nothing else has come along to threaten that accolade.

If you close your eyes and picture a wristwatch, you’ll likely imagine something circular and flat, with 12 numbers and two, or maybe three, hands. The traditional watch is a platonic ideal emphatically lodged in the modern psyche. Or as Mr Martin Frei, designer and co-founder at the independent watchmaker Urwerk, puts it: “It’s a pictogram ingrained in the matrix – something that society wants you to understand from childhood onwards.”

By my conservative estimates, based on the highly scientific data-gathering method of spending hours of my life scrolling through Instagram, in a single year there are millions of pictures of watches shared worldwide. Some of them are fantastic, shot with professional-grade kit and lovingly photoshopped; some are just a well-timed snap on an iPhone. They all have one thing in common though: despite technically existing forever (or at least until Meta and Apple and Google are distant memories), every Instagram post is fleeting. Double-tap, scroll, scroll, scroll – here today, forgotten tomorrow.