Seven days and no apologies
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ยท
I once watched a man in the saleroom bid on a Big Pilot by raising his entire forearm, his own Big Pilot still strapped to it. The auctioneer did not misread the gesture, and neither did anyone else in the room.
That is the 46 mm watch in a sentence. It is 46.2 mm across, 15.6 mm thick, and it makes no apology for either figure. This is the line that descends directly from the 2002 revival, the one that made oversized pilots fashionable for the better part of a decade, and it keeps what made that watch famous: the seven-day reserve, all 168 hours of it, shown on a power reserve indicator, wound by IWC's Pellaton system inside the 52110. There is a date as well, which I could live without, but at least it is discreet.
The odd note is 60 m of water resistance on something that looks as though it should survive a ditching in the Channel. The closed caseback is correct for the type.
Who should buy it? Large wrists, long sleeves rolled up, and someone who has fully accepted that the watch will enter every room a second before he does. Thirteen and a half to fourteen thousand dollars is steep, but it is the original modern statement and not the reduced version. If you have to ask whether it is too big for you, it is.