A. Lange & Söhne, Lange 1

The dial is off-centre because a group of people decided, in the early 1990s, that the symmetry of a wristwatch was a convention rather than a law. They were right. The Lange 1, reference 101.025, was shown in October 1994, four years after the company was re-founded in Glashütte and five years after reunification made the re-founding possible. First watch from the new Lange. It set out what the new Lange intended to be, and thirty-two years later the answer has not needed revising.

The case is 38.5 by 9.8 millimetres. Calibre L901.0 inside, seventy-two hour reserve, German silver three-quarter plate, balance cock engraved by hand. The engraving faces the wrist, under a sapphire crystal, where the wearer cannot see it. Our department has reviewed this arrangement and finds it entirely consistent: the most laboured element on the watch is the one nobody looks at while wearing it.

Everybody writes about the outsize date. We are going to skip it, because it is the least interesting thing here and because the coverage has been exhaustive since roughly 1995. It works. Two discs, two apertures, one frame, changing at midnight in a single step rather than creeping through the hour beforehand. Fine. Done.

The interesting part is what the date forced. Put it in the upper right and the dial can no longer be symmetrical. Everything else then has to be arranged around a decision that was, commercially, completely optional. Nobody asked for this. There was no market research demanding an off-centre dial from a company that had not existed for forty years.

So the subsidiary seconds went lower left. The power reserve went between them. Hours and minutes moved off-centre and sat left, where the eye lands first. The whole composition resolves into something that reads correctly at a glance and looks wrong on paper. Every element is where it is because another element could not move.

That is the opposite of how dials are normally laid out, and it is the reason this one has survived three decades of revision essentially unaltered. You cannot restyle it. Pull one thing and the rest collapses.

A note on the reserve, since the trade never puts it plainly. Seventy-two hours means the watch runs Friday evening to Monday morning untouched. That is a specification written for somebody who owns other watches and rotates them. Nobody in the industry says this out loud because saying it concedes that their customers are not wearing the thing daily. We are happy to say it.

This example sits in a private collection and is not for sale, which spares us the section we like least. The first series is distinguishable by the depth of the engraving and the finish of the plate, visible only with the watch open, on a bench, under magnification, by somebody who already knows what they are looking at.

Thirty-two years old this October. Still made. Still recognisable at fifty paces. Still the best argument anyone has produced that a wristwatch can be strange without being loud. Our verdict is exceptional and our confidence is total, which is not a combination this publication issues often.