Whether given as a gift or purchased for oneself, My Classima commemorates an important moment in life: a professional success, a diploma, a personal journey… While reflecting the brand’s heritage, its design offers a closed case-back with space to engrave a message, date or initials.
Wishing to share its values with a larger audience, the brand made this timepiece accessible to all, the price starting at $990.
As Baume & Mercier’s signature semi-casual apparel watch, the resourceful Clifton is able to play host to a pretty vast array of complications — all from easy GMT and moonphase displays, to endless calendars and this wild minute-repeating pocket watch. So it should come as little surprise that for 2017, as in years’ past, the entry Richmont brand is leaning on the Clifton’s flexibility to showcase their latest technologies: an in-house made manual-winding movement outfitted with a distinctive system meant to boost accuracy.The Baume & Mercier Clifton Manual 1830 is the very first Richemont set watch to deploy this new technician, known as TwinSpir, which is centered around a new type of proprietary silicon hairspring developed by the Richemont Research & Innovation team. This fresh spring is comprised of a distinctive, composite construction that unites two layers of silicon, alternatively oriented and bound through a layer of silicon dioxide. The goal was to produce a hairspring which was not only resistant to the usual consequences — corrosion, magnetism, etc., but one which was also largely resistant to changes in temperature and infinitesimal variances in tension while it oscillates.Now, calling TwinSpir the foundation for a thermocompensated mechanical motion could be something of a gross oversimplification, but this is not far from the premise, either. But, rather than consciously correct for changes in temperature, this method mutes them. For example, in which a normal hairspring might show varying levels of elasticity (and therefore subtly differing oscillation rates) on the wrist on a warm afternoon, vs. sitting on a bedside table, the basic assumption of TwinSpir is to create a more consistently stable hairspring that’s mostly immune from these types of thermoelastic variances regardless of the watch’s ambient temperatures. Additionally, as the hairspring expands and contracts through its normal oscillations, the layered structure was made to create a perfectly even and more consistent oscillation, eliminating any subtle irregularities in elasticity (or even “elastic anisotropies”) that would also adversely influence the chronometric speed — a known functionality characteristic exhibited by many conventional hairsprings.