Swiss Made

Until 2014 the Emporio Armani watch catalogue, produced under license by Fossil Group since 1997, consisted almost entirely of fashion-oriented quartz watches. In March of that year, at Baselworld — then the world's most important watch fair — the brand presented, with a simultaneous global launch, its first "Swiss Made" collection: a line of mechanical watches with certified Swiss automatic movements, designed to give the brand a watchmaking credibility that went beyond the purely fashion register it had been associated with until then.

Aesthetically the collection looks explicitly to the elegant, tailored taste of the 1930s and '40s, in keeping with Giorgio Armani's stylistic sensibility: classic case shapes, warm and delicate dial tones, materials that — in the brand's own communication — are designed to "follow the lines of the body". The launch included five main series, among which "Melting Gold", in cognac and warm-gold tones with a smoke-colored cabochon crown, "Glowing Rose" and "Bright Mesh" stand out, for a total of about one hundred models across men's and women's variants.

The technical heart of the collection is the STP1-11 caliber, an automatic mechanical movement with hour, minute, second and date functions, produced by the Swiss manufacture STP (La Joux-Perret); some case executions, as with the "Melting Gold" model, use a light gold plating over a 42-millimeter steel base, with anti-reflective sapphire crystal and 50-meter water resistance. Simpler automatic variants and some GMT executions were introduced in the months following the launch, progressively expanding the line's offering.