If the portmanteau of Belgian watchmaker Ressence doesn’t stimulate your instincts for finery, its new collab with HODINKEE will. The brand that marries “renaissance” with “essence” turns out the Ressence Type 1, a crownless watch with an intricate, layered, and skeletonized dial milled from a single piece of titanium.
And if the shapes and form factors weren’t enough, the Type 1 Slim HOD is even more mesmerizing once it’s operating. The dial itself turns in the watch face to indicate minutes, while the subordinate dials also spin. It’s a bit of an entrancing effect, somewhere between watching a moving rendering of the solar system and a time-lapse of a blossoming flower. In fact, the brand appears to indicate that the movement is an entry point to an alternative experience of time itself.
Ready to get lost in the perpetual circularity of the fourth dimension (via an extremely expensive and exclusive watch)? We sure are.
Time is a Sphere: Ressence Type 1 Slim HOD Watch Dynamics
Ressence calls its orbital movement system ‘ROCS,’ or the “Ressence Orbital Convex system.” It uses an arrangement of satellite gears to carry dials showing different elements of time, arrayed on a rotating main dial. The effect, HODINKEE says, “encourages the wearer to view time both as a whole and in terms of our relationship to its specific components, as we’ve defined them culturally.”
That’s a bit of a head-scratcher, especially in HODINKEE’s somewhat convoluted wording. But just for the sake of a thought exercise: With the Ressence Type 1, could it be that the brand is urging us to reconsider our location within the web of existence that is the universe? A universe that is itself an eternally expanding and multi-dimensional environment? Which, by logical progression, then, would invalidate our Western cultural agreement that time is a linear path, measurable with grids and a sequential, unidirectional numerical system?
And might not HODINKEE’s assessment, if true, suggest that we could potentially move at any possible vector adjacent to the straight line we currently perceive as “time?” And then, logically, that what we perceive as the end of that timeline, namely our deaths, could, in fact, be a fallacy?
But I digress. What we do know about the watch is that it shows really cool movement and striking machining. It’s milled from a single piece of titanium, Which is crazy when you start to look at all the honeycomb-like layers.
Into the Limitless: MSRP and Availability
HODINKEE and Ressence’s new thin watch will set you back a bit. It will also be quite a challenge to obtain. Even if you don’t end up being able to use it to displace yourself from our presumed timeline, you will experience an MSRP $22,500 hit from buying it. And we advise you to get on the waitlist — we can safely assume that it is, in fact, a finite and sequential line, and the watch is limited to just 20 examples.
