This Brand Only Makes 100 Watches a Year. This Is the Wildest One
Naoya Hida & Co. moves at its own pace. The small Japanese watchmaker delicately handmakes around 100 timepieces a year — a drop in the ocean of the countless new watches announced and released every week — and it unveils them all at once during an annual spring trunk show.
This year appeared no different. A lineup of ten new watches was announced alongside each location of the trunk show. Then, on its first stop, the New York menswear boutique The Armoury, Naoya Hida & Co. hit us with a surprise, showcasing its most ornate watch ever.
The unanticipated timepiece is a third collaboration with The Armoury, and this time, they’ve called on the expertise of master engraver Keisuke Kano to carefully hand-engrave the silver dial of each timepiece with three feathers.
The level of detail is sublime. Each tiny hair is delicately placed by hand, jutting from a textured vane that appears remarkably lifelike. Above them, precision-milled 18kt yellow gold hands tick away.
Naoya Hida & Co. made its name in indie watchmaking with the quality of its craftsmanship and classic look of its watches. The "golden age" of mechanical wristwatches in the 1950s and ‘60s informs its creations, but these brand-new objects are produced with some of the most advanced micro-milling technology in the business. The beauty is in the subtlety of hand-engraved dials and the hands' faint details.
But this collaboration is perhaps its most overt offering to date. You don’t have to be a hard-core horologist to see the beauty of those hand-engraved feathers dominating the dial. However, if you’re partial to the design, then you’ll have to submit an application by May 18 and dish out $33,000.
Even then, you’ll have to fight some serious aficionados to claim one of the only ten made, which is actually a pretty deep offering by Naoya Hida & Co.’s standards.
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