THE JOURNAL
For the return of our About Time video series, we’re showcasing the latest and greatest watches from three brands: NOMOS Glashütte, Cartier and Panerai. We begin with a deep dive into the design behind NOMOS Glashütte’s watches, a young brand that has picked up hundreds of awards and accolades for the strength of its designs.
NOMOS Glashütte was formed in 1990 as the Cold War ended and private businesses were allowed to work in East Germany once more. Glashütte, a small town near Dresden, had been the traditional home of German watchmaking for centuries. Suddenly, it was the setting for an explosion of new and revived watch brands.
The brand made its debut with four watch models – the Tangente, Ludwig, Orion and Tetra – and what’s remarkable is that those four not only remain part of NOMOS’s offering in 2021, but are almost unchanged. Each of the original four – references 101, 201, 301 and 401 respectively – still lives on, still cased in 35mm diameter stainless steel cases (27.5mm square for the Tetra). That’s what you call getting it right first time.
NOMOS has grown a great deal since the early 1990s and now boasts hundreds of references across 13 defined families of watches. Nearly all of them, however, owe something to one of these four, whether that’s immediately apparent (the Ahoi’s evolution from the Tangente, for example) or simply adheres to the principles that were laid down with that original collection. It’s what we refer to as the brand’s design language and at NOMOS Glashütte it is evident in every watch.
Often reduced to Bauhaus, there is much more to it than that. But NOMOS watches are undeniably recognisable for their 20th-century European aesthetic, which stands apart from anything influenced by Switzerland’s 18th- and 19th-century classicism.
We took three watches from the MR PORTER collection – modern-day descendants of the Tangente, Ludwig and Orion – to demonstrate up close the subtleties and overall principles that make a NOMOS watch so distinctive. Artfully connected by a shared philosophy and differentiated by thoughtful touches that give each its own character, the three watches are the perfect introduction to NOMOS Glashütte.
Go to the MR PORTER YouTube channel for to watch all previous episodes of About Time, including Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC and Vacheron Constantin.