I Love The Cheap Fake Breitling Navitimer Watches
I’ve encountered so many fascinating watches – I’m sure you understand my dilemma…
Of the replica Breitling watches for sale on my shortlist for the future, for divers it’s Omega’s Seamaster 300 2535.80.00 with GMT. Racing chronographs? Probably an Autavia or Carrera. Field watches? Maybe Hamilton’s Khaki… But for this article, my watch is aviation-related to reflect my lifelong interest in flight. It’s Swiss, genuinely iconic and has a long history too. And it’s still in production, with strong visual and historical links to the original. Oh yes, it’s also a mechanical chronograph.
My watch choice is the Breitling Navitimer, launched in 1952. This post-war classic has evolved ever since and was recently updated with a rattrapante complication (‘the ultimate mechanical chronograph’) for Baselworld 2017 – just before CVC Capital Partners bought Breitling…
Navitimer – Breitling’s defining watch?
Breitling was founded in 1884 in St-Imier, Switzerland. Soon, the company’s flair for technical perfect clone Breitling watches, and the dawn of aviation, led to the strong association with flight and flyers that’s defined Breitling ever since, much as motorsport defined Heuer.
Three-quarters of a century later, in the early 1950s, Breitling was growing with the post-WW2 boom in aviation. The watchmakers then launched what was to become their most iconic timepiece. The Navitimer is arguably the wristwatch that’s defined the brand ever since. The Navitimer’s ‘optimised calculating capabilities’ are manifest as a miniature circular slide rule. This evolved from 1941’s Breitling Chronomat and the many other on-board and wrist-worn aviation chronographs that Breitling developed during the 1930s. Interestingly, during this period, Breitling launched their more modestly priced – and therefore more accessible – Montbrillant 12. As Willy Breitling is quoted in Breitling The Book (2009): ‘The low-priced chronograph is intended to cultivate the general public’s taste for accuracy. Popularising the chronograph among young people will have felicitous effects…’
Over 80 years later, Breitling holds 25% of the premium segment in Switzerland (shared with Chopard, Longines and Tissot). It’s interesting to note (EuropaStar Time.Business Chapter 3 2017) that at SIHH and Baselworld 2017, ‘most of the brands…pushed their launches at the entry price level of the brand.’ What goes around …
A ‘smart watch’ for the 1940s
At the time, this was as innovative as today’s smart best fake Breitling watches. It completely justified the description, ‘Une création sensationelle!’ in contemporary advertising where G. Léon Breitling S.A. proudly boasted how Chronomat users could quickly and easily solve mathematical problems in diverse scientific and technical domains. A decade later the world was rebuilding, propellor-powered commercial aviation was in its golden age, the jet era had begun and recreational aviation started to boom. Simultaneously, chronographs’ popularity followed Willy Breitling’s prediction. In the post-war period, they grew to unprecedented levels alongside Breitling’s presence in on-board instrumentation. The Navitimer Years had arrived….
Breitling’s ‘wrist instrument’
Building on the Chronomat’s success, 1952’s Navitimer was Breitling’s ‘wrist instrument’ and the watch that quickly became its most iconic. According to many Breitling experts, the 1950s and 1960s were Breitling’s heyday and the time of their most desirable replica watches – before they became something of a cliché rich-man’s accessory and inspired so many lookalikes…
The heyday of the Navitimer – and aviation watches
The heyday of the Navitimer came just before electronic and satellite navigation aids made cheap replica watches, and even traditional E-6B circular flight computers, redundant for anything but basic pilot training. Nowadays, the slide rule and chronograph functions make this another example of the modern wristwatch as anachronism. In fact, the Navitimer perfectly demonstrates a wristwatch as the ‘multivalent and semiotically charged object’ referenced by Peter Oakley in ‘Ticking Boxes: (Re)Constructing the Wristwatch as a Luxury Object’ (Luxury, 2:1, 41-60, 2015).
The epitome of bold gutsy design and innovation
Since 1884, Breitling has helped define how modern chronographs – and arguably modern high quality replica Breitling watches – look. They’ve done it with bold, gutsy designs and unique ideas too. Not least, giving 1950s aviation its ‘smart watch’ in the form of the original Navitimer – the epitome of what bold design and innovation should be. Old or new, I’d love one, with all the history and aviation associations that brings. One day, I think, I’ll probably make a Navitimer mine!
