What I’ve noticed lately, and I hope I’m wrong, is that Hublot replica watches don’t actually get thus much love like they used to a while back. True, they’re not quite your everyday pieces and because the gens have some truly absurd price tags attached, it is possible that most people don’t think they can pull off the look.
The Paris-based label was founded in 1895, and gained a reputation for selling footwear to the glamorously well-shod of Europe and America, including Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and Frank Sinatra. Remember though, not everyone is a watch expert, thus pulling off the whole Hublot look is actually easier than it seems. Perhaps its most celebrated client was Andy Warhol – one of Berluti’s best-sellers is still the Andy loafer, designed for the artist.
I don’t remember them coming with anything new, maybe except the sapphire Unico (you can find here a nice read on this piece). Today Berluti’s reputation for leather remains unsurpassed and it has now turned its hand to creating limited-edition straps and dials for Hublot’s Classic Fusion, with black leather for the black ceramic model and tobacco-coloured leather for the rose gold. I understand the situation because this is actually a niche watch, but my point is that a good Hublot clone is not that easy to find. The label’s trademark Venezia leather is treated in the same way as it would be for, say, an Andy loafer, from the patterning and patination to the cutting and the assembly.
Some of their replica watches are truly revolutionary, no doubt about that, but they should actually up their marketing game if you ask me. The black model’s strap features the Berluti Gaspard slash, which is a deliberate evocation of the potential beauty of the flaw, while the tobacco is engraved with a design inspired by 18th-century calligraphy – another Berluti signature classic.
The case is black plated stainless steel with a carbon fiber pattern and it houses a Japanese quartz movement, thus the seconds hand doesn’t actually have that sweeping motion, but since it’s small, you can’t actually tell unless you take a good look at it. I’ll end my post with the video below, thus you can get a better idea of what this Hublot replica is all about.