Off topic: Presenting the MING 19.01

Many of you will know that I’ve recently brought my interest in watches full circle with the launch of my own watch brand earlier in the year. We were surprised and humbled by the response, but also fortunate as we had another project in the works at the same time: something at the other end of the spectrum, and our flagship: the 19.01. Whilst the 17.01 was designed to be an honest watch that brought a lot of the features valued by collectors to a more accessible price point, the reality is there were a lot of things I wanted to do that I simply couldn’t because of production cost restrictions. This is not the case with the 19.01, which was designed without compromises ad to be something very special in a world that’s already got a lot of very special watches. This is of course not a simple task, and required something special aesthetically, mechanically and stylistically consistent with previous designs so as to fit within the MING lineup.

A quick rundown for those interested in watches: it houses a special version of a long (>100h) power reserve, manual wind movement exclusive to us, and developed by Schwarz-Etienne in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. The dial is sapphire, and we developed a new finishing process for complete opacity in the centre, fading towards complete transparency at the edges (and inspired by centre ND filters). It’s a very airy watch, complete with partially skeletonized bridges, made more so by the deep box sapphire crystals front and back. In fact, both crystals act like a light guide of sorts and results in a floating appearance on the wrist as the bottom crystal catches light and glows. On top of that, there is no printing anywhere on the watch: all markings are laser etched into the crystal by means of focused laser beams creating microscopic bubbles within the crystal that appear opaque (if you touched both sides, they would be completely smooth).

The prototype arrived just in the nick of time a few days before my departure for the Salon QP exhibition in London: that gave me a total of three days to shoot and retouch what would eventually turn out to be 35 images. This is honestly an experience I would not want to repeat as it required basically a non-stop marathon work session in the studio; I would normally take two weeks for something like this. Fortunately, having also designed the watch – it’s easy to previsualize in advance the angles you would like to photograph, and how to set up the lighting; some small tweaks would of course be required in practice, but I could work more efficiently than with a completely foreign watch. That said, the counterbalance comes in the form of a difficult client: some of the images I envisioned were not that easy to execute in practice because of stacking, lighting angles etc. and the simple reality of having to match one’s mental expectations with the time at hand.

I leave you with a set of images – this is after all, still a photography site, and I believe the watch really speaks for itself. For more information on the watch itself, please visit www.ming.watch.. Pre orders open 7 November and continue with a special price to 31 December 2017. MT

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