TAG Heuer Just Dropped a Skeletonized Titanium Chronograph
Few things bother me as much as a watch brand defiling a classic, storied, vintage design through needless modernization. TAG Heuer has never been in danger of such offense with the classic Monaco chronograph of 1969, because that watch was designed to be a platform for avant-garde ideas. Square, brightly colored, and (by the standards of 1969) huge, the Heuer Monaco has long been a blank canvas for TAG to come along and push against aesthetic and technological boundaries. Now, it appears, TAG Heuer wants to push the pricing boundaries as well.
Few could have seen the $183,000 split-seconds Monaco coming from TAG Heuer last month at Watches and Wonders. Let that price sink in for a moment. What? For a TAG Heuer? That split-second Monaco sent two very clear messages: TAG Heuer is going upscale, and its Monaco is the vehicle that’ll take it there.
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In hindsight, I suppose we could have predicted that a watch like this brand-new Monaco Chronograph priced at $12,000 would be the next offering, and if brands still released their annual catalogs all at once, I’m sure we’d have seen this new model at Watches and Wonders last month. But watch brands drop watches throughout the year now, so here it is: the avant-garde, skeletonized Monaco at a relatively sane price.
And yet, this Monaco Chronograph is still rather expensive for a TAG Heuer, indicating the upmarket inclination of the brand.
When Robb Report asked TAG Heuer CEO Julien Tornare about this upward trajectory last month, he told us, “It’s really about the long-term strategy. [W]e know exactly where we are, where our core range is based. But we also want to introduce more high-end at all levels.” Tornare is speaking to a well-known strategy by which brands produce outlandishly expensive and complicated watches in order to trickle its elevated vibe down through the rest of the catalog. Tornare goes on to say that “it’s not so much about targeting a specific price range, but it’s more about added value to our products.”
The new Monaco Chronograph sports a colorway intended to evoke the eponymous storied site of one of the greatest auto races in the world. The blue evokes the Mediterranean Sea, and the brand’s marketing copy states that the dashes of yellow evoke the sparks that fly from the world’s fastest cars careening around tight corners. The case is titanium, which for a watch this size is going to lighten things up considerably, and the caliber 02 auto-winding movement provides 80-hours of power reserve and—because this watch is skeletonized—a rather compelling view of the works.
The less-heralded hero of this watch—and certainly of the $183,000 split-second Monaco chronograph—is TAG Heuer’s head of movements, Carole Forestier-Kasapi, an industry legend with serious chops. As Tornare told us last month, “[S]he has incredible ideas, and you know my past; you know how much I love high watchmaking. So, it’s a pleasure to have her on board and to work on the future surprises that we’re going to have for our clients.”
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