Marie-Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny & Perpetual Motion

Chapter 19

Las Vegas

In June of 2014, I flew from New York City to Las Vegas to the heart of modern horology. The JCK Show in Las Vegas - its name an abbreviation of Jewelers' Circular Keystone, a magazine founded in 1875 - is the premiere American watch and jewelry show and a place for the established jewelers to converge en masse to stock up for the season. Worldwide, JCK is second only to BaselWorld in Basel, Switzerland, an event that plays host to watchmaking's glitterati for almost two weeks every March.

At JCK, watches are seen more as fashion items than as works of engineering or experimentation. But a small minority of watchmakers are still creating watches the way Breguet did in his atelier. I checked into the Paris hotel, with its outsized model Eiffel Tower outside and French-themed casino, and walked the strip to the imposing Venetian hotel, where under lavish chandeliers and applied moldings that would rival Versailles in opulence if not quality, I entered the world of haute horlogerie, Las Vegas style.

Like any convention, the show is split up among multiple rooms, and each manufacturer or dealer has a booth. There are giveaways - towels, candies, or notebooks are popular - and the higher-end brands escape the rabble by hiring $10,000-a-night suites in the hotel's upper floors, accessible only by appointment and armed escort.

Watchmaking in the modern age lives in a halfway place between art and commerce. The old piecework of the Swiss has been replaced by whirring robot arms on an assembly line, and Nicolas Hayek's "pyramidal base" of watches consists of watches that cost a few dollars to make and sell for a king's ransom. The mark-up for the jeweler, one manufacturer told me, is thirty to fifty percent. This means a watch a jeweler buys for $250 can sell for $500 or more in the store. Imagine this writ larger on some of the more opulent pieces, and a price of $100,000 in the jeweler's window means a price of $50,000 wholesale.

This goes a long way toward explaining why most watches are "expensive." Watchmakers want to distribute their wares to shops - called "doors" in the business. While many manufacturers like Seiko and Citizen want more and more doors, including many department and discount stores, higher-end makers try to reduce the number of doors to which they sell. This creates scarcity, and when the watchmaker markets his wares on the pages of glossy magazines - when Cindy Crawford or another actor or starlet is seen wearing a Chanel J12 white ceramic watch (about $9,000 retail) - the dearth of product ensures the distributor can maintain his markup while the watchmaker makes a sale.

Take Stephen Hallock, former president of MB&F North America. This boyish entrepreneur wears custom shirts, handsome tailored jackets, and the latest jeans of the season. He keeps fit and trim, his beard raffishly unkempt and his hair soft and tousled. MB&F - which stands for Maximilian Büsser & Friends - is a small company that calls on the talents of a number of master watchmakers, Büsser included, to create what Hallock cals horological machines. These watches are not your grandfather's Rolex. Starting at about $200,000, they are masterpieces of design and horology, incorporating odd, rare materials with a disregard for watchmaking's traditional forms. See, for example, the MB&F HM3 Frog. It looks like a stylized cyber-frog, with two bulbous crystals displaying the time and a rotor - shaped like a battle-ax - twirling over the "thoroughbred" movement in a window shaped like a jolly mouth. The effect is at once whimsical and alien and as far from a watch as anyone has ever seen.

Hallock is a techie who fell into a love of watches, and his movement in the circles of Silicon Valley allows him access to such luminaries as Andy Rubin, Vice President of Engineering at Google. Like a modern-day Breguet and Gide, Büsser pushes the state of horological art while Hallock sells the resulting timepieces to the rich and powerful.