The old-new Da Vinci collection from IWC made its return at SIHH 2017, ditching the not very successful angular case from some ten years ago in favor of a classical, round design. As safe-play as that may sound, the IWC Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar Chronograph Replica has, sort of unexpectedly, stepped up to be one of my favorites from this year’s new releases and here’s why that is.
I’ll go out on a limb and say this: IWC Replica US perpetual calendars – especially the Portugieser variants, of course – have for a long time been among those genuinely complicated and expensive watches that I could see people… well, actually wear. Not just in fancy airport lounges or events, but also in perfectly everyday settings, out and about – though likely more so in big cities of world’s rich countries than elsewhere.
“When in doubt, go round” may just be the mantra at Fake IWC Watches, but, as we’ll see, not without reason. Seemingly in tune with the recently re-styled Ingenieur, which has also dropped its more agressive and angular lines for a circular, more target-group-friendly look, the Da Vinci returns to framing its many indications with a perfectly round bezel. Boring it isn’t, though, as it offers many fine and some unexpected details, so let’s work our way through all of these.
The soft look of the applied gold indices contrast rather beautifully against the sharp, angular, pointy hands – a subtle but impressive detail. Swiss IWC Watches some thirty-plus years of experience in designing similarly feature-packed dials shows in how the silver-plated dial lacks any outstanding patterns or texture, serving as a soft-glowing backdrop that allows all other nicely separated elements to stand out, improving legibility and easing on aesthetic overload.
The year window above 7 o’clock is clearly more for bragging rights than for anything else – if it were to make watchmakers’ lives easier to set the perpetual functions of the movement it could still be hidden by the dial itself. But Cheap IWC Replica even goes so far as to say that they already “supply the century slide bearing the figures 22, 23, and 24 for the years 2200 to 2499 – you know, just in case manufacturing technologies in 2247 wouldn’t allow for the making of this small piece.