Vianney and his daughter have been good friends with us since the Goldpfeil years, and here is a shot from a Sony 101 5 mpeg camera, in 2004, at the beach one night in Singapore when we brought them around the island.
Mainly to see the vast container terminals, probably the largest in the world...with its own "city", passport, bus service, homes..
Years later, I would end up doing a picture book on Vianney, which sold out after it was printed by another collector, into China and the middle east.
Vianney, Dufour, Rolf Schnyder, Max Busser and Gunther Blumlein helped me to see watches the way they saw it.
I was a great fan of IWC way back in the early 1990s.
Later, in 2009...I actually began to see SEIKO as well, from a broader perspective of cultures, both Swiss versus Japanese, and today, I see SEIKO as probably the most open to ideas, and willing to move forward on ideas that would gain good reptation, but loose money.
Only Ulysse nardin and De Bethune are like that, and probably a very few others.
Yes..looking at these pictures, even now, I realise that I have been inside the very core of the industry since 1993 and maybe even earlier...before watch magazines began to become common, or even advertisements for watches! Or even things like cabinets to keep watches!
It is a fact that in 1993, I told Liam Wee of Sincere watch, that one day, people would make boxes to keep watches, especially in groups of 8 to 12...besides the Scatola ones...but large wall mounted or floor standing pieces...and we laughed that it would not happen!