ALPINE ASCENT
Haute monde 1970s was an unabashedly nomadic experience. You could wake up one day in Mustique and the next in Marrakesh. Its glitterati eschewed the permanence of any one home base as it had embraced in the 1950s with New York and in the ’60s with Swinging London. The 1970s effectively fused mid-century café society with the rebellion of the ensuing decade and an altogether new breed of peripatetic hedonism. As if in much needed escapism after a period of radical political upheaval and social change, the ’70s was about carefree libidinousness with a brazen succumbing to one’s carnal impulses as demoiselles and dandies alike took to the dance floors of Regines and Studio 54 in a hedonist trans-global gathering of the tribe.
In the ’70s the watch world was similarly amid upheaval as the Swiss industry reeled from the opening salvos of the quartz crisis that would grow to decimate watchmaking so effectively that before the decade was over, 50,000 people would have lost their jobs. Amid this period of liminality, in order to reflect cultural changes and express a new spirit of freedom, one watch designer began to conceptualise a new category of timepiece that would be equally at home plunging into the swimming pool of the Hotel du Cap, on your wrist guiding a Haston-clad ingénue through the serpentine labyrinth of some sweaty after hours boîte, or holding court in front of your board of directors. It was a watch that was equally appropriate when you were wearing an evening suit or your birthday suit. It was the integrated sports chic timepiece and its father was a maverick genius named Gérald Genta.
His first overture that ushered in an all new era for this style of watch as the ultimate symbol of rakish
