My own “education” in this specialized world of ticks and tocks would have been far poorer without ever having known him, that’s for certain. Gerd-Rüdiger Lang was also one of the first important watchmakers I met after my own entrée into the watch industry in 1991 (working for a German watch magazine at the time, it would have been nearly impossible to get around him). Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, founder of Chronoswiss The brand’s name – LANG 1943 – is a direct homage to Lang, with 1943 being his birth year. The LANG 1943 Field Watch Edition One vibrates with nostalgia, a desire for perfection (in good Chronoswiss tradition!), and the honorific glory that Bartkowiak always wishes to bestow upon Lang, a watchmaker who everyone in the German watch industry not only looks up to, but venerates. Reminiscing at the LANG 1943 launch with Miguel Seabra, the author, Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, and Antonia Lang And that really shines through, not just in the way all the partners interact with each other, but in the watches as well. This was truly a family affair – and yet another example of how meaningful these people are to each other. Therefore, 79-year-old Lang was also present at the intimate launch event at Tegernsee – along with his wife, Antonia Lang, and Bartkowiak’s wife and three-month-old son. The cherry on top of all of this crazy creativity is that Gerd-Rüdiger Lang agreed to become the new brand’s consultant and ambassador. And he’s been off like a rocket, designing and working on prototypes throughout the pandemic so that there must be hundreds of ideas on paper and in prototype dials and cases, some of which I’m sure we’ll be seeing emerge over the next few years. But once that was worked out, it was all systems go. It took him some time to get the right partners to aid in financing and infrastructure for the venture. One of Bartkowiak’s notable early collaborations with Lang was the Chronoswiss Zeitzeichen, a collaborative watch that appears to still be in Chronoswiss’s catalogue even though this company has been under new ownership since 2012 (more on that below).īartkowiak had the idea for LANG 1943 several years ago. A selection of classic Chronoswiss watches worn at the LANG 1943 launch event (photo courtesy Miguel Seabra)

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