Picking the top 5 dress watches of the last 12 months

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Due to the lingering ball-ache of Covid and its various lockdowns, it’s not like we’ve been attending many soirées, opera festivals or masquerade balls over the past two years. But the mark of a great dress watch is its ability to surpass the need for a dress watch. Here's a highly subjective round-up of a handful of the best dress watches from the last 12 months that you can wear anywhere, and inject a bit of "fancy" into your life.

1. Cartier Tank Must Collection

The ethos behind the vintage Must de Cartier watches was bringing Cartier’s love of design and artful watches to a more accessible level, and that’s exactly what the new range does too. Three variants with the same shape as the Tank Louis Cartier range play host to shades of heartwarming  depth, with an abyssal blue, Bordeaux red, and a cool forest green. Quartz movements keep the price attainable, but without any indices for the hours or minutes, mechanical isn’t necessary.

2. Fears Archival 1930

Rectangular watches have always harkened back to the 1930s, a time when wristwatches were beginning to become an essential accessory. Fears Watches have a proud history spanning 175 years, and this perfect recreation of one of their classics from 1930 is a wonderful celebration of that anniversary. The attention to detail from the carefully-sculpted blued hands to the gilt frame is superb, not to mention that it utilises a new-old-stock ETA calibre 2360 from c.1986.

3. Baume & Mercier Clifton 10584

This Clifton from Baume & Mercier is a real lesson in high-end value, as for $11,300AUD you can get a watch hewn from solid 18k pink gold, that also has a COSC-certified in-house movement with five whole days of power reserve. But, the watch isn’t just a spec sheet, with lots of wonderful attention to detail such as the warm silver-to-grey fumé dial and an elegant printed crosshair.

4. Grand Seiko SBGY007

Representing the snow-covered surface of a frozen Lake Suwa, the artisans of Grand Seiko have created this beautiful ice-blue dial with a crisp and delicate texture. Most complaints regarding Spring Drive watches were their asymmetrical power reserve indicators and often large diameters, which Grand Seiko have remedied in the hand-wound SBGY007. Its svelte 38.5mm proportions and simple, clean dial truly exude elegance, as does that gently sweeping seconds hand that is the Spring Drive’s signature.

5. Patek Philippe Calatrava 6119G-001

To be a Patek Philippe Calatrava is to be the very essence of a dress watch — understated, simple, yet all of the existing aspects must be absolutely perfect. With the new 6119G-001, we see a truly modern dress watch, with a guilloched hobnail texture on the bezel and a vertical graining on the charcoal-grey dial to give just enough intrigue for your eyes to pour over it. Flip over to view the movement, and you’ll be stunned again.

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