Outgoing CEO Julien Tornare signed off his last new Zenith watches with a flourish, before moving up the road to take charge of TAG Heuer. The new watches demonstrate all the sharpness and savvy that made his promotion widely predicted within the industry.
As so often in the watch world, the secret of Tornare’s success at Zenith has been navigating the heritage without resorting to pastiche, a tougher job here than most, as so much of the brand’s usable heritage is rooted in a short period around the early 1970s, with designs that are too of their moment to update without radical surgery. It’s a brave CEO that sets design briefs of this kind.
