Pictures can be really misleading, and often, press kit images can, for all sorts of reasons, actually make it harder to understand a watch. The gulf between the first impression you get from a press kit image – which often is all that enthusiasts have to go on – and the kind of impression you get when you actually handle a watch, is sometimes a huge one. Of course some of this is just due to the fact that no picture can capture the experience of actually seeing a watch in person and having it on your wrist, but with press release photos especially, the gap between how feel when you see a picture, and how you feel when you have a watch in front of you, can be especially dramatic. The most recent, and one of the most vivid, examples of this for me was with the Seiko Fugaku Tourbillon.
The Fugaku Tourbillon was something very unexpected from Seiko, which is a company the general public still pretty much associates with $150 department store quartz watches (albeit dependable and accurate ones generally a bit better built than you would expect, in an absolutely bewildering variety of designs). For most enthusiasts, the most interesting Seikos are the mechanical timepieces starting with the beloved and blessedly affordable Seiko 5, up through the tough, good-looking dive watches, and through the Prospex sports watches, all the way up to Grand Seiko. With Spring Drive technology as an interesting counterpoint to the high end mechanicals, and with the Grand Seiko quartz watches rounding out the higher end offerings, you'd think Seiko would have more than enough breadth of approaches and variety in designs to keep them busy, but at the very high end, there are the Credor watches as well – including the Credor Sonnerie, the Credor Minute Repeater, the Credor Eichi (which we once compared, hands on, to a Laurent Ferrier Galet Microrotor and a Philippe Dufour Simplicity) and now the Credor Fugaku Tourbillon.
The Credor Fugaku Tourbillon created a lot of buzz, but also some of the skepticism that can follow a very high end complication (though for many purists, the tourbillon isn't a complication at all, but a regulating device) from Seiko. This seemed sharpened for many by the somewhat garish appearance the watch had in press images: peacock blue (or so it seemed) decorative accents warring for attention with gold and other brilliant colors, and a riot of decorative flourishes that seemed about as un-Seiko as you can get. In person, however, the effect is very different – this is still a lavishly decorated watch, of course, with maki-e lacquer work by Iishu Tamura, engraving by Kyoshi Terui, a bezel set with sapphires, inlaid mother-of-pearl, and an elaborately stylized design based on nothing less than the beloved Great Wave Off Kanagawa, by the master known as Hokusai. But the precision of the work, and the oddly balanced feel of the overall composition, work in person in a way that isn't entirely clear from the press images.
In particular, in press images the incredible play of light on the various elements is pretty much lost, while in person it's one of the most important factors in the success of the design. The bright blues of the press photos are almost nowhere to be seen, replaced by a palette of deep indigos and lapis lazuli-like ultramarines, that give the dial and movement decoration an unexpected depth, and that combination of meticulous decoration of every surface and richness of execution that seems much more redolent of the Japan of the Edo period than the neon glare of a manga cover.
Taken all together, the effect of all this decorative work is still a bit overwhelming, but it impresses not with the seemingly chaotic clash of warring elements that you expect from the press images, but rather with an aggregation of decorative flourishes that, overall, sum up to a subdued opulence that sends as much a message of accumulated masterful technique as it does outright luxury.
The old assumption that a photograph is objective in a way that a drawing or painting is not, should be largely a thing of the past (thanks, among other things, to the effectiveness of digital manipulation in making us think we're seeing things that aren't really there). At the same time, however, we are still often comfortable formulating definitive views on the basis of photographs; the old irrational belief we have that a photograph shows reality dies hard. The Credor Fugaku Tourbillon is interesting as a watch, and as a decorative object, and as an example of the practice of several demanding decorative crafts, as well as a statement from Seiko about its intentions in high-end watchmaking. But it's also interesting as an object for consideration of the importance of first impressions – and the value of regarding them as provisional rather than definitive.
Full specs and pricing for the Credor Fugaku Tourbillon can be found in our introductory article.
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