We’ve reached the point in SIHH preview season (which is how we watch media folks tend to regard the holiday season) when we would normally reveal which of its collections IWC will be focusing on in 2018. This year, however, things are a bit different. Because in 2018, it will be 150 years since Boston watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones sailed to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and established the International Watch Company (now known much more commonly by its initials, IWC), which remains the only Swiss watch brand founded by an American. To mark the anniversary, IWC is breaking from its usual tradition of devoting the year’s new product output to one particular family, and instead releasing what it calls its Jubilee Collection ? 27 limited-edition models across four families. Read on to discover five Jubilee models that IWC has announced ahead of the collection’s full debut at SIHH 2018. All the dials in the Jubilee collection are imprinted in white or blue and feature up to 12 layers of lacquer finishing.
Despite the watches being spread out among the Portugieser, Portofino, Da Vinci, and Pilot’s Watch collections, the IWC Jubilee collection is united as its own family of sorts by a distinctive aesthetic element: their imprinted dials are all either white, with blued hands, or blue, with rhodium-plated hands, and are finished with multiple layers of lacquer to achieve a look reminiscent of vintage enamel-dialed pocketwatches. All are mounted on black...