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EditorsMay 08, 2009
A Berlin Story
I flew to Berlin two days ago, essentially, to attend a dinner party. If that sounds decadent, well, you don’t know the half of it. Last night, A. Lange & Söhne, the prestige watch brand from Germany’s Saxony region, staged...
I flew to Berlin two days ago, essentially, to attend a dinner
party. If that sounds decadent, well, you don’t know the half of it.
Last
night, A. Lange & Söhne, the prestige watch brand from Germany’s
Saxony region, staged one hell of a launch party. In a temporary event
space located in the heart of the city’s storied Mitte district, not
far from the copper domed Berlin Cathedral and the space-age TV Tower,
the brand unveiled the new Lange Zeitwerk, a mechanical timepiece
featuring a jumping numeral display that uniquely blends the
horological sophistication for which Lange is known with an aesthetic
of unambiguous modernity.
Berlin was an inspired choice of venue. No other city feels
quite so progressive. Last night’s dinner is a good example. Lange flew
in retailers and press from around the world, teasing the event with an
invitation bearing one simple quote from Ralph Emerson: “When it is
dark enough, you can see the stars.” That in no way prepared us for the
meal, the details of which remained top-secret until moments before we
were led single-file, hand to shoulder, into a room enveloped in
complete darkness—and when I say darkness, I mean pitch-black visual
deprivation the likes of which I’ve never experienced.
Blind waiters from the unsicht-Bar, a popular local restaurant
where diners are seated and fed in the dark, were on-hand to serve us a
three-course meal featuring risotto and ox paired with crisp German
whites. The disembodied voices of my fellow diners were the only things
that kept me from breaking into a panic.
I’m still not sure what the connection between the Zeitwerk (which,
by the way, loosely translates to “opus of time”) and dinner in the
dark is but that hardly matters. On a scale of sex appeal, the event,
the city and, of course, the watch take top honors.
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