Examine other beauties... The Perfect Dress Watch ... Lange 1

There are of course many beautiful watches outside of the few that I currently own and normally focus on. At the same time, I wanted to acknowledge 2 classic beauties to hopefully drive home a point. An advice of mine from my lengthy "watchbuying advice" post is to buy a classic beauty in your eyes. To provide you an understanding of what classic beauty is, please see the two pics below.

If by seeing these two ladies and you still don't know what I am getting at by classic beauty, you need glasses or some lessons on the appreciation of beauty in women and potentially for other forms as well. Luminous, radiant, classic, timeless and fully deserving of awards :)

The beauties that I seem to focus on in the watch realm tend to have something to do with the octagon or pretenders to the throne in the luxury sports watch range. The Royal Oaks and Offshores from Audemars Piguet definitely qualify as classic designs and gorgeous watches, but what else deserve some focus in this wide universe of watches? What else really works? If you know through my blog, I don't own a dress watch and am not much inclined to get one anytime soon, but if I were to ever buy one, it would not be a Patek or a Journe or a Dufour(even if i could afford these)... It would have to be the ...(drumroll please)... the Lange 1. A masterstroke in design and totally succeeding in what it set out to do, which was to play an integral part in the revival of fortunes of the house of Lange, a wonderful story engineered with German precision and excellence by Gunter Blumlein, Walter Lange and Hartmut Knothe in 1994 before Richemont came in and bought over Les Manufactures Horologie (LMH) who then managed Lange, JLC and IWC.



A Lange & Soehne's Lange 1

The Lange 1 is a classic beauty. Honestly i'm not into the super simple face watches like Patek's calatravas, Stowas(did i just mention stowas in the same breath as pateks???), Dornbluths, IWC portugesers, Dufour's simplicity, Richard Lange etc, its just that the the plain, super simple look of the watch doesn't appeal and some are actually a bit yawn-worthy to me. I do recognise how others can like these watches and can recognise that they do have an appeal for other folks and some may say as you mature you may come to appreciate them but uhm I don't see it happening for a very very long time for myself.

The Lange 1 however is a different proposition. Its also got a pretty simple face but with 2 dials, non-overlapping indicators, not overly simple but with a very clean face and to me it just looks perfect as a dress watch.

The most beautiful examples in the Lange 1 range for me are the ... mother of pearl guilloche dial, the white dial and the grey dial, the luna mundi and timezone models. I am a pretty large guy so the size of the Grand Lange's and the timezone, luna mundis appeal to me more than the regular Lange 1 sizes but the Grand Lange's dial design loses out to Lange 1's for me due to the overlapping indicators and the track and look on the smaller dial and the red indicator markings for the power reserve.


Maybe one day larger and nicer versions will be made and ... maybe one day she will be mine... Just maybe :)