Abstract
This chapter examines the connections between the luxury industry and heritage paradigms, with an anthropological focus on craftwork and techniques. In this regard, the current organization and recent history of Swiss watchmaking offer a useful case study. Indeed, the current dominance of the Swiss watch industry in the market of high-added-value timepieces and the unprecedented success that the concept of heritage enjoys in the Swiss watch world may best be understood, jointly, by going back forty years. At that moment, the Swiss mechanical timepiece industry was under extreme pressure from a structural crisis, which began in 1974. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the category of heritage has been used as a means for industry leaders to progressively update the value of their mechanical products and reposition them into the luxury market. An exploration of the Swiss watch industry also reveals that, in the 1980s and 1990s, many Swiss brands went upmarket by selling products in their traditional styles but incorporating high-end mechanisms created and developed by skilled independent craftspeople, who were experienced in repair and restoration. This shift of heritage products into the luxury market has, in turn, reshaped the notion of the craftsperson or artisan and led to the emergence of a new category of watchmakers called ‘independent creators’.
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Notes
- 1.
This research, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, was part of a collective transdisciplinary project called ‘The Midas Touch’ (2009–2015), devoted to the description and analysis of the issues generated by the implementation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Swiss context.
- 2.
A tourbillon is a system devised to compensate for errors of rate caused by the earth’s gravitational force in upright positions. In this system, the escapement (mechanism whose purpose is to maintain the oscillations of the regulating organ) of the watch is mounted in a revolving cage with the regulating organ (balance) at the center. The cage generally revolves once a minute and, in doing so, compensates for errors of rate caused by the vertical position in which pocket watches spend most of their time (Berner 1961; FHH 2016).
- 3.
A mechanical wristwatch that is very technically complicated is not necessarily more accurate or reliable than a simple one. On the contrary, according to some experts, the more complicated a mechanical watch is, the more it is potentially subject to breaking down.
- 4.
As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, watchmakers in Geneva had already started to lose interest in the whole process of timepiece production and to focus on the more lucrative steps of assembling and finishing rather than on machining (Blanchard 2011, p. 59).
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Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude to Trevor Marchand and Marie Deer for their uncompromising proofreading of this chapter.
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Munz, H. (2018). Crafting Time, Making Luxury: The Heritage System and Artisan Revival in the Swiss Watch Industry, 1975–2015. In: Donzé, PY., Fujioka, R. (eds) Global Luxury. Palgrave, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5236-1_10
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