We are in the heart of autumn. The mornings are crisp, the mist is hovering a little longer than those early hours, the golden afternoons fly by in what seems like mere minutes, you start to reach for the comfort of an extra layer and take full advantage of the fall style I, for one, long for the entire year, and look to cosy up at home a little earlier every evening. It’s about the best time to embrace all things simple, feel-good, real and authentic. And welcome new ones that promise to become mainstays, and even story tellers, in your life. My Cora Maple & Silver JORD wood watch is one of them.
I am more than pleased to have been invited to join the JORD wood watches team. I have an ongoing love story with watches, but trying to pin down my fascination with timepieces is not exactly easy. It just is. I know I like the history behind, the functionality, the dynamism they engage, the nod to menswear style. But I like them as stand-alone accessories, too. The kind that have become part of my everyday look – and now, that my schedule revolves around a baby for the time being, it’s less about telling the time and more about appreciating the moments…, and being my little (much-needed) daily luxury.
That said, when I was asked to choose a luxury watch from the JORD collection, I knew what I was looking for – simplicity, elegance, high standard, timelessness. But when my watch arrived, from St. Louis, Missouri, I was surprised with much more – craftsmanship, attention to details, quality mechanical engineering, character. And a new experience.
JORD is the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian word for earth. There is something about my new watch that commands authenticity and purposefulness.
What finally made me settle for the Cora Maple & Silver model (a next to impossible task when I have to choose a watch) was the classic and clean design and the natural wooden, nude-tinged hue, which make it very versatile to wear. What has made me love it even more once I started wearing it is that it is is even more understated than I had anticipated, it’s incredibly light, it is automatic (those seconds I steal every morning to wind it truly feel like a luxury, too, and a much sought for me-moment) and it has an open case back revealing the mechanism beneath (that only adds to the sense of craftsmanship and beautiful design). The watch is hand-finished and made of natural maple wood, it features a sapphire crystal glass and Swarovski crystal markers. And last, but not least, the packaging was beautiful, too. I give importance to well thought packaging, just as I do to a beautiful book cover. The watch came in a wooden box, secured inside around a herringbone fabric (another nice touch) cushion. Every little detail was inviting me to remember to savour the journey I was about to start with my new timepiece. I know I will.
This blog post is in partnership JORD wood watches. Wooden Watch Review
Opinions and thoughts, entirely my own. Photos: by me and exclusively for Classiq.
– a proper movie night, without me usually falling asleep after less than half an hour, is still pretty much out of the question in our life with a six (six?!!) months old baby, so documentaries (which I have no problem with watching in more parts if necessary) of any kind are our new thing at the moment – about Sydney Pollack’s filmography, with both Pollack and Redford talking about their seven movies they made together. And right at the end Sydney says something about their working relationship and friendship (I am a sucker for this kind of lifetime friendships’ insights) that I liked very much: “When we shot a film together we practically lived together. I cook a lot. And he can’t even make a cup of coffee. So he would always come over to my condo or apartment or room or whatever it was and we’d sit and have a bottle of wine and cook and talk about tomorrow’s work or whatever. But we would laugh and make each other laugh and always talk about the fact that we ought to make a comedy and I am really sorry we haven’t.”
, who set the tone for the next fifty years of Bond understated elegance, a style formula carried out by his tailor, Anthony Sinclair, who created the now famous “Conduit Cut”. Sinclair took pride in how his clothes functioned like a second skin on Sean Connery. “Any well-made suit,” he told an ABC News interviewer in the 60s, “you should be able to take it, roll it into a ball, crush it, stamp on it, sleep in it, and then” – smoothing the narrow, impeccably draped lapels of the Sinclair suit he himself was wearing – “there you are, you’re back again, you see?”
, directed by Martin Campbell, I had only seen a few classics from the series. It made me a fan and prompted me to want to watch all the rest of them. Not only was it very good, but it was new, a new type of Bond film, with a story anchored in reality, stearing away from many James Bond movie rituals, starring my favourite Bond girl ever, Eva Green, and a Bond who was darker, sharper, edgier and colder, but also more human than the earlier Bonds. We got to see Bond inventing himself.
, Fred Astaire may be the most famous wearer of top hat and tools, but James Bond played by Sean Connery is probably the movie figure most synonymous with the classic dinner suit (or tuxedo, the term commonly used in the United States) – “a curio in the male wardrobe: a specialist item, yet designed more for effect than function, expensive, yet rarely worn, supremely elegant”, yet worn with the ease of a t-shirt by every Bond.
. In an interview for GQ, she said: “I had a long meeting with Daniel and he told me what he wanted: a slim-fit suit tailored very near the body. Daniel wanted a suit you could forget – a suit that wasn’t on top of his body, but moving with his body.””I wanted Bond to look perfect all the time, so I chose Tom Ford shirts that had a tab under the collar – great for the action scenes – and light blue and sky blue colors, because they go wonderfully with Daniel’s eyes. I also wanted a tie you could forget; I didn’t want Bond to be the guy with a tie that has a little square on it. Those are too loud, and you’ll just remember the wrong design. The trousers were flat-front and belt-less – [belts] are so nineties.”
. He exudes a classic, yet unrestrained elegance. In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig wears a Brioni wool suit in a subtle charcoal grey and navy plaid. The shirt is also Brioni, in pale blue with light grey stripes, with a moderate spread collar and double cuffs with rounded corners. The shoes are black John Lobb Luffield derbys. “It’s the best thing that can happen to a man, a beautiful suit, a nice shirt, a great pair of trousers, and shoes that just look gorgeous. I hope that when they see Bond, they realize that you can have a really active life and look very sexy without looking confined” (costume designer Jany Temime).
