First, let’s take the more recently announced of the two: IWC’s latest Big Pilot model. This was announced to the world in December 2021 and didn’t get a huge amount of attention in the build-up to Christmas. It’s a Spitfire edition of the existing Big Pilot, and introduces a rather unusual dial design, but before we get to that, it’s worth remembering that this is doubly unexpected – or rather, that it builds on unexpected foundations.

Last year, the Big Pilot became less big, shrinking from 46mm to 43mm in diameter. It was a move that was broadly welcomed as making the famous aviator’s watch a bit more accessible for more people, but also drew no end of quips – that it should henceforth be called the “medium-sized pilot”, and so on. No-one saw a smaller Big Pilot coming, and now we have this model, which I think it’s fair to say was equally unanticipated.

The Big Pilot’s Spitfire is cased in titanium; unusual for a heritage design, but something IWC has been doing from time to time in the Spitfire line for a few years now. More notable is this “observation”-style dial layout, so called because it draws on designs used for military navigators. By moving the hours to an inner dial, it prioritises the minutes and seconds, as the information that would have been most crucial should you be attempting celestial navigation in a WWII-era bomber, for example.

The upshot on a modern watch, however, is a quirky layout that manages to be somehow both minimalist – we’ve only got the basic timekeeping functions here, after all – and busy, with two layers of information and those gaps at three, six and nine on the outer ring drawing the eye. It’s a technical, unusual take on the basic Pilot’s watch and just maybe a future cult favourite.

Next, a watch with a lot of similarities, but also some fundamental differences: the Panerai Luminor Perpetual Calendar in Goldtech gold. There’s a lot to unpack there – like the IWC, this starts from a somewhat unexpected premise in that the Luminor, deep in its ancestral origins, is a military-grade dive watch. And yet here we are looking at a rose-gold timepiece on an alligator-leather strap. You might think that itself is an odd way to proceed, but if you know Panerai, you’ll know it’s a touch unfair as it is a long-established fact that every single Panerai watch comes in one of three case shapes, and all three of them derive from military-grade dive designs.

What’s more interesting here is that this is a perpetual calendar, one of horology’s most prestigious and complex challenges, but at a glance it doesn’t look to be massively more complicated than a standard Luminor. In the past, Panerai has given us all manner of high-end watches, so it’s not the complexity alone that’s surprising, but they have tended to be visually spectacular to match, under the “Lo Scienzato” sub-category, with skeletonised dials for tourbillons, minute repeaters and so on.

Here, Panerai is taking on a so-called “grand complication” but – gold-case aside – downplaying its status in favour of a clear, uncluttered dial. It makes sense when you realise that the month, year, leap year and power reserve indicators that you’d usually find on a perpetual calendar are all moved to the back of the watch. It just goes to show, with a little thought, there really is a lot you can do with a 70-year-old military design.