Its Navitimer B01 Chronograph 43 Boeing 747 ($9,400) featured a cream-colored dial, black subdials, and red and white details, echoing the colors used on the original 747. “I like these kinds of cockpit-in-a-plane references in a watch,” Alessandra Cianchetta, the Italian architect, designer, urbanist and artist who now is teaching at the Yale School of Architecture. “They are the most striking.”
Ms. Cianchetta talked about the ’60s as a period of expansion, optimism in technology and social reforms. “You have to take this into context,” she said, “not just look at aesthetical design elements.”
For example, she said a sign of the ’60s influence in New York City was the 2019 hotel renovation of the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport, which was designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. (Coincidentally, the first commercial Boeing 747 flight took off in 1970 from the airport, bound for London.)
Since 2002, Mr. Bove, the freelance designer, has led design teams at, in sequence, IWC, Chopard, Breitling and TAG Heuer.
Most recently, in February, he left TAG Heuer, where the team had completed the silver and black panda-dial TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph 60th Anniversary ($7,400), presented in January during LVMH Watch Days.
The anniversary watch was not a re-edition. For instance, the hand-wound movement was replaced with an automatic one, requiring the watch to be 14.55 millimeters thick rather than the original 12. And the diameter was increased to 39 millimeters from the original 36, to match today’s prevailing taste.
