Three wildly wonderful watches - check out the bad boys of the watch world

Wild boys! Wild boys! Wild boys! The wild boys are calling. No really, they are. OK, that was an oblique opening, and perhaps betrays my unfathomable fondness for British pop group Duran Duran, but in the past few weeks, I’ve been deluged with info on new watches from the “wild boys” of the industry: the upstart independents.

Last week we looked at three show-stoppers from the Salon International de la Haute Horlo­gerie, the first big watch fair of the year, but they were all from estab­lished brands. This week, we look at the Young Turks, the enfants terribles, the disrupters of the watch world, and their off-the-wall wares.

We are going to start with the Maestro Mamba, the latest wacky luxury timepiece from the irrepressible Christophe Claret. For those unfamiliar, Claret is a stone-cold genius when it comes to innovation in watchmaking but his mad-as-a-box-of-frogs timepieces – well, how do I put this diplo­matically? – are total Marmite. Either you love his eccentricity or hate it, and after a quick glance at the Maestro Mamba it’s easy to see why. It’s a hard watch to love, but one you won’t forget, that’s for sure.

As the name and design would suggest, the watch is inspired by snakes, in particular the African mamba, and a “snake” coils itself around the move­ment, ready to strike, I suppose, out of the centre of the dial. Gimmicky, yes, but this is hard to execute and it does highlight the cutting-edge DMC16 movement in an interesting way.

The snake is quite arresting but the colour, particularly of the green snakeskin strap, is in your face (there’s another version in orange), so it’s all rather over­whelming. The 42mm case is titanium and the watch has a power reserve of seven days, but it would take a brave person to keep it on for that long.