Parmigiani Tonda PF “GMT” Rattrapante (W&W 2022) - Need Some Help Here

I could use some help, maybe even from @Robert-Jan here

The NYT has a piece on this year’s W&W, covering a few pieces I’ve not seen reported in my usual haunts.

As a lover of the GMT, and especially of GMT’s with new or unusual approaches to displaying two time zones, I am both excited and confused by this watch.

I’ll let the NYT (partially) explain it






So, I get that in normal ‘non-travel’ usage the nifty trick of the rose gold hand “hiding” behind the rhodium-plated hand. In this normal/non-travel configuration, the watch appears to be a simple two-hander.

And, I get that that when “converting” to the GMT function the rhodium-plated hand pops forward in one-hour increments (a so called “travelers GMT” or “true GMT” approach), while the rose gold hand stays behind remaining to indicate “local” time.

And, I get that the button on the crown sends the “travel time” hand wizzing back over top of the rose gold “local” time, in rattrapante fashion

This far, it’s all very cool and I’m very intrigued with this approach. There’s a cool video of the hiding/revealing/rattapanting on Parmihiani’s IG right here

But here’s what I definitely don’t get: either this is a constant 24hr movement for both hour hands (seems very unlikely to not be mentioned because it’s unusual for people to want a 24hr), or somehow the magic buttons convert the rhodium gold hand from a 12hr into a 24hr hand (seems impossible as the dial orientation wouldn’t match for 1/2 the times), or the hour hands are both 12 hr hands and this isn’t a GMT watch at all?

I’ve looked around for the few other press releases I can find (eg at ablogtowatch, etc.) and no one mentions it. The company’s few IG posts and videos on the watch don’t explain, nor does the company’s website. I’ve also now posted on the company’s IG asking after.

But if anyone here finds/knows - and especially if @Robert-Jan might ask the company while he’s at W&W (knowing he’ll be too busy to see this)

Until there’s better info, I’m convinced this company has a mere dual-time watch with both hands on 12hr time, that it has officially named and released as a GMT? Seems too kooky to be true, but I can’t understand the fix.

How do you know that?

I've always understood rattrapante meaning to catch up so most rattrapante complications are on chronos for obvious reasons. In this situation, the rattrapante complication are the hour hands instead of seconds hands. I think the rattrapante is correctly used although not in the sense that most watch people would use it. Calling this a GMT if it's not a 24 hour hand is a misnomer.

Ok, so we agree this watch they’ve named a GMT (including on their website) isn’t a GMT.

For a watch attempting to play at this caliber, it’s pretty wild they named the watch incorrectly (I could overlook an incorrect description in their copy, but to miss-name the watch?!)

ALSO pretty wild that the watch rags I’ve seen “cover” it haven’t noticed/called this out - I mean, ignoring for the moment this “coverage” is actually just regurgitating a press release handed to them by the company. But still…

As for the rattrapante, I’m really not agile with the history of it all to say - but seems to me they’re fairly saying they’ve applied the rattapante complication to a GMT hour hand rather than it’s traditional chronograph utilization?

$28K for a GMT that can’t describe GMT time. Doesn’t have date. Doesn’t have seconds hand.

And since we’re piling on, I didn’t want to over-complicate the initial post to mention, but suffices to say that a double 12hr “dual time” without an AM/PM indicator is … *sad trombone*

Nice catch!

Love that Worn and Wound didn’t bother to mention this GMT is not a GMT.

On their dismissal of the AM/PM indicator: one loss is that the watch becomes unwieldy to use as a “telephone” dial time (ie, when in your local time, repurposing the second time zone to tell you a far off place’s time).

And more generally, their dismissal of the AM/PM indicator even for “normal” travel is telling: sure, a person that goes on a 4 day vacation twice a year 4 time zones away can ‘easily’ remember if home time is AM/PM. But frequent travelers who might in a single 2 week trip make multiple stops across the globe start to appreciate the at-a-glance information a person wants, without risk of inaccuracy or mistake.

Relatedly, if you’re traveling in the air for extended times, you cannot in fact “just look out the window” to determine if local time is AM/PM (because local time is your destination, which may be hours and sunsets away).

T knowing if it’s AM/OM is, after-all, a reason GMT and other 24hr standardized times are useful in the first. Saying “who needs an AM/PM indicator” is the same as saying “who needs 24hr time scales” - answer: people who look to buy a “GMT” watch

I suspect they weren’t making many in the first

Globemaster GMT; that was my thought too.

Hopefully that will motivate Omega to do something in this direction. Never heard of “schlubby” before but I rather like it, albeit not at that that price.

The idea of a “rattrapante” GMT reminds me of the mock-up of a GMT I did for Adrian Buchmann at Christopher Ward, based on the Tudor Aeronaut, where the GMT hand and the running seconds were made to look identical to trick the casual observer into thinking they were looking at a rattrapante chronograph.