America’s luxury watch extravaganza, WatchTime New York, is returning for its fifth consecutive year at midtown Manhattan’s Gotham Hall on October 25-26. This year’s event is shaping up to be the biggest yet, with 37 participating watch brands displaying their latest and greatest timepieces. Among these brands is Maurice Lacroix, which will be showcasing its playful and innovative new model, the Aikon Mercury.

The philosophy behind the latest and most out-of-the-box addition to the sporty Aikon family is “the quicksilver fluidity of time” (hence the name “Mercury”), here represented by an unprecedented “free hand” system in which the central hour and minute hands dangle freely, obscuring the correct reading of the time, until the wearer tilts his wrist into place to read the watch, when the hands return to their proper stations and point to the correct hour and minute. This unique display, which took three years for Maurice Lacroix to develop and perfect, uses two snail-cam mechanisms hidden under the openworked dial ? one for hours, the other for minutes ? and harnesses the natural forces of gravity to manipulate them. When the wearer turns his wrist to look at his watch, bringing the watch’s movement perpendicular to the ground, two weighted levers are pulled into contact with the cams, which then drive the hour and minute hands into their correct time-telling positions. When the wearer drops his wrist, gravi...