‘It Feels Cooler’: Gisele Bündchen Believes in the Power of a Big Watch
In under a minute, Gisele Bündchen convinced me I should buy a 41 mm timepiece.
The new IWC on the Brazilian supermodel’s wrist was the first thing I noticed when we connected via Zoom on Wednesday. Bündchen is 5′ 11″, invented the runway’s bold “horse walk,” and is broadly cited as ending the waif-like heroine chic of the 1990s embodied by Kate Moss. That the 43-year-old rocks a large-format watch aligns with her powerful legacy, and the large IWC chronographs she’s been sporting around Watches & Wonders this year look undeniably amazing on her.
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“This is the Portugieser Dune,” she says excitedly. “It’s so chic.” She holds her wrist up to the camera, though the sizable steel piece hardly warrants a closeup. It is one of the three new Portugieser chronographs the Swiss watchmaker released at Watches & Wonders this week. The trio of chronographs showcases new dial colors—Horizon Blue, Obsidian, and Dune—that reflect the atmospheres of day and night. Bündchen tells me the Horizon Blue hue paired beautifully with her white suit yesterday, while the sandy Dune shade works well with the more understated ensemble she’s sporting today. I can’t argue, and I make a mental note to add the $8,400 chronograph to my wishlist.
Bündchen is particularly taken by the moon phase that appears at 12 o’clock on the new Portugieser Eternal Calendar and Perpetual Calendar. Interestingly, Bündchen—a known spiritualist who Vanity Fair reported “regularly communes with birds, squirrels, and butterflies”—only allows her hair to be cut on the crescent moon or full moon. She intends to use the moon phase to coordinate her cuts. “I don’t need to go on the internet and look for that information, it’s right on my watch,” she explains.
Speaking about IWC’s newest colorways, she says, “I think it all depends on what you’re wearing. I would definitely have one that is more like classic, like, you know, the golden Dune, and the blue one for sure because you need to have something a little different.”
As an IWC ambassador and the brand’s first Environmental and Community Project Advisor, Bündchen is paid to wax lyrical about even the smallest of changes to IWC’s various novelties and convince us all to shop the collection. Paid endorsements aside, a huge amount of R&D has gone into IWC’s new colorways. The IWC team considered factors like longevity and timelessness before settling on the new dial variations, and achieving such specific hues is no small feat of watchmaking.
It’s this attention to design detail that first attracted Bündchen to the brand. “Look, I have to tell you that initially, it was the aesthetics,” she concedes, “because I really didn’t understand everything that went into it.”
Bündchen says she bought an IWC for her dad about 20 years ago, long before the brand made her the face of the Portofino line about two and a half years ago. She has worn a white Portofino Chronograph 39 for many years, in fact. “I love it and it goes with everything,” she adds.
As Bündchen has spent more time immersed in the watch world, she has started to look beyond aesthetics. She says she’s “really into the mechanics now.” She spent yesterday at Watches & Wonders and today at the IWC Manufakturzentrum, or what she describes as the “cleanest, most beautiful factory,” getting the skinny on high horology. “Now that I’ve learned how the watches are really made, I like it [IWC] even more,” she explains.
Despite Bündchen’s penchant for larger watches, she acknowledges that the smaller dials historically associated with women’s watches are “cool for certain outfits.” But she thinks the bigger faces make more of a statement. She holds her chronograph up to the camera again, asking “It kind of feels cooler, right?”
Bündchen is firmly of the belief that we should ditch our gendered views on watches. “I think all the watches are unisex, to be honest with you,” she says. “And I think that’s the cool thing. We have so many different options and so many different styles, why should one person not be able to wear it? Because, I mean, who cares? Whatever makes you happy, get it.”
We couldn’t agree more.
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