Controversial opinion: summer is overrated. At least, if you live anywhere where the cultural expectation is nostalgic hot summers, but the reality is perennial flooding interspersed with unbearable heat waves. And every two years the national football (soccer!) team will play keepy-uppy with your emotions. Winter is far superior. ’Tis the season, after all – you have better festivals, such as Thanksgiving, and the holidays aren’t far away. While the weather isn’t always peachy, it’s definitely interesting. It’s the best season sartorially, as well: layering comes into its own, but you’re not so cocooned in outerwear that you can’t show off a few choice pieces.

Before Hermès Timepieces took the watchmaking world by storm with the sporty yet sophisticated H08 and the carefree, summery Cut, it was beloved among collector circles for another family of watches: the Slim d’Hermès. It remains a formidable design in the brand’s portfolio. In fact, we would argue that it represents a peerless fusion of traditional and modern watchmaking aesthetics.

When Jaeger-LeCoultre launched what would become one of its most enduring watches in 1965, it was known merely by the uninspiring code E859, after the brand’s then habit of naming its models based on the three digits of its calibre number. Arguably that conveyed little to potential customers – which is why a US sales agent for the brand took it upon himself to give the alarm diving watch a proper name. What, he must have wondered, would sound potent and powerful? How about taking inspiration from the nuclear-armed, submarine-launched ballistic missile that had been introduced earlier that decade, and which would come to be totemic of the Cold War? Today, of course, we know this model as the Polaris. Watch history is replete with watches given evocative and often fantastic names, among the many no longer extant brands of the 1960s. There was the likes of Favre’s Moon Raider, for example, or Wittnauer’s Futurama. They normalised a trend to use names as a means of imbuing a watch with a certain character: adventurousness perhaps, exoticism, masculinity or, in these instances, a taste of tomorrow’s world. In some cases, the watch name has come to supersede the brand itself.

Watch collectors, in our experience, are acutely preoccupied with the question of what will come next, in terms of their chosen hobby. Maybe it’s a natural side-effect of surrounding yourself with dozens of tiny measuring devices, all designed to tell you how long until the next full moon. Or the next leap year. Or the end of your oxygen supply (that one you really should pay attention to).

Controversial opinion: summer is overrated. At least, if you live anywhere where the cultural expectation is nostalgic hot summers, but the reality is perennial flooding interspersed with unbearable heat waves. And every two years the national football (soccer!) team will play keepy-uppy with your emotions. Winter is far superior. ’Tis the season, after all – you have better festivals, such as Thanksgiving, and the holidays aren’t far away. While the weather isn’t always peachy, it’s definitely interesting. It’s the best season sartorially, as well: layering comes into its own, but you’re not so cocooned in outerwear that you can’t show off a few choice pieces.

Before Hermès Timepieces took the watchmaking world by storm with the sporty yet sophisticated H08 and the carefree, summery Cut, it was beloved among collector circles for another family of watches: the Slim d’Hermès. It remains a formidable design in the brand’s portfolio. In fact, we would argue that it represents a peerless fusion of traditional and modern watchmaking aesthetics.