Watchmakers throughout history have taken cues from the insect world. The Vulcain Cricket marked the time with a shrill chirp, and butterflies and bees inspired designs by brands such as Kari Voutilainen, Omega and Seiko.
But it was the exoskeleton of the dragonfly that was the basis for the complex case-within-a-case of the Tragwerk 2.0, a watch introduced in August by Kieser Design, a small, family-run brand in Frankfurt. (The design, which has a skeletonized outer case around a circular inner one, debuted in the brand’s inaugural Tragwerk T Signature Edition model in 2021.)
Both watches, produced in limited editions of 25 pieces each, featured a honeycomb-style dial comprising about 250 hexagonal cells, each one milled individually in-house. Matthias Kieser, the watchmaker behind the brand, said they were “designed to reflect light in a way that’s reminiscent of a dragonfly’s compound eyes.”
But for Mr. Kieser, the dragonfly has been more than just a design motif or an artistic muse: He wanted to convey the insect’s resilience and near weightlessness in watches composed almost entirely of titanium, a metal prized for its strength and light weight.
And he refined a finishing technique that uses anodization, an electrochemical process, to recreate the vibrant, metallic hues — blues, greens and purples — seen in some species of the insect. (Word of the results has traveled, he said, and, reluctantly, he has been declining requests to anodize parts for other brands.)
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