Joker

Konstantin Chaykin announced the Joker at Baselworld 2017 and the room turned. Everything on this dial does a job. The left eye is the hours. The right eye is the minutes. The mouth, in red lacquer, is the moonphase. Nothing is decoration.

That is the trick collectors underestimate. It is easy to draw a face on a watch. It is difficult to make the face be the movement, so that the eyes roll as the day passes and the expression changes with the lunar cycle. Chaykin engineered the module himself, on a Swiss base, in a workshop that measures its annual output in the low hundreds.

The blackened case here is the version that reads hardest. On steel, the Joker can look playful. In black, with red on the lips and red on the bezel engraving, it looks like something that got out.

Values behaved the way values behave when a small maker produces an object nobody else can copy without being obvious about it. Early pieces traded above list within a year and have not seriously retreated. The Joker is now the reference that introduces most collectors to Chaykin, and for many it is the only one they need.

It is a serious watch dressed as a joke, which is precisely the register that ages well in a collection full of tool watches and dress watches behaving themselves.