Manufacture Royale releases their ninth caliber, the MR 09. With this new watch movement, they come into a new aspect of their watchmaking expertise, putting on a more contemporary demeanor for their watchmaking expertise.
Their new collection is called ADN, the French manner of saying DNA. By choosing this name, Manufacture Royale signals a change that is going bone-deep… or perhaps they are now revealing things that were always there.
Certainly their new watch, the Manufacture Royale ADN, goes a long way towards revealing their inner workings. The watch is skeletonized, but unabashedly complicated. In a way, Manufacture Royale is doing more, showing more, and doing it in a more uncompromising way. Their new watch shows us a flying tourbillon, and two time zones, each tracking their time in a different manner.
It would be an ambitious undertaking even in a watch that did not lay bare all the mechanical clockwork. As it is, the ADN is practically audacious. It reveals the local time on a larger, jumping-aperture display, with hours being revealed in jumps as they pass and minutes being tracked by a sweeping sword-shaped minutes hand. The second time zone is more traditional, perhaps reflecting the steady, stabilizing influence of home. After all, no one tracks dual time zones if they’re trying to forget where they came from.
But looking at the face of the Manufacture Royale ADN can chase all thought of tradition and home from your mind. The watch is an uncompromising vision of the future. It’s the smart guy in class who refuses to dumb down his answer to make you feel better about yourself. The Manufacture Royale ADN presents itself as beautiful, elegantly off-center, and unconventional. It plays by rules, but the rules are of its own choosing, and it doesn’t care if you get them or not. The watch is showing you the future, and it’s telling you to evolve or die.
The flying tourbillon, the jumping aperture, and the skeletonized presentation of all this makes the ADN a watch from a cutting-edge concept of beauty. If this watch really does represent DNA, it’s from a race of creatures that has evolved beyond us. We may have to run to catch up. But that’s not a bad thing; just as mankind does its best technological advancement in competition, so too are we exhorted to improve ourselves when a challenge appears.
