When Tudor released their Black Bay Harrods Edition earlier this year, I was quite impressed. In fact I happened to see one when I visited Harrods in February or March, and to be frank it was everything you could want from a Harrods Edition. It wasn't a dramatic departure from the standard range but it had a 'Harrods' green bezel and a Harrods 'H' on the back, and perhaps crucially it was a numbered limited edition. The perfect blueprint for how to do a Harrods watch effectively.
So recently there's been a spate of 'Harrods' watches from Bvlgari and Roger Dubois and now this from TAG Heuer. While the Bvlgari has a green dial and strap and the Roger Dubois Excalibur has flashes of green, neither watch comes close to using the correct tone for Harrods' signature green. Meanwhile TAG have completely abandoned any notion of going with the flow and instead given us this...
It seems they've basically taken the white dial from the Calibre 11 edition (sans the blue touches) and matched it with the 'original' Autavia bezel as found on the CBE2110. Which is fine, I guess... but at first glance it just looks like a JH85 with the 'wrong' bezel and as a 'Harrods' edition it's rather underwhelming if you ask me.
Roger Dubois Pigs Ear Excalibur...
The problem is, when you think of Harrods, you think of that green colour and to TAG's credit, unlike Bvlgari and Roger Dubois they haven't had a go and made a pigs ear of it (RD especially since they've used two different greens on the same watch, neither of which is even near the Harrods green and they don't even complement each other which is the real issue...), but then they haven't hit it out of the park like Tudor did either. The other day I saw one of the Harrods Tudors on Watchfinder, going for about 50% over the list price. I think they'll sell it, and I think that watch could become very collectible in time.
Bvlgari - wrong but not as wrong as the Roger Dubois
These TAGs... I don't see it. There's nothing wrong with them but they're not different enough and there's nothing 'Harrods' about them. They might as well just have released these as a standard part of the range really...
https://oracleoftime.com/three-new-limited-edition-watches-from-harrods/
No comments:
Post a Comment