In the admittedly unlikely scenario a keen high quality Panerai replica watches fan were to wake up at the end of 2023 after a five-year coma, they might reasonably assume the world had gone mad.
Checking any list of the most hyped watches of the year, they would have found it included a ‘Barbie’-pink Tag Heuer, an acid yellow G-Shock produced in collaboration with Ed Sheeran and a Halloween-themed spoof of the revered Fifty Fathoms diving watch – the ‘Fifty Phantoms’ – covered in small ghosts. Even Rolex (Rolex!) was now producing cheap UK fake watches covered in colourful balloons and jigsaw pieces. Never had the watch world’s favoured word for new editions, ‘novelties’, seemed so apt.
Yet for every ‘watches-are-meant-to-be-fun-guys’ advocate there’s surely another for whom Swiss made replica watches are not expensive accessories that can be seduced by the whims of fashion, but investments that shouldn’t date. You never actually own one, you merely look after it for the next generation, and all of that.
As one CEO recently told our sibling publication The Big Watch Book, in relation to 2023 being ‘the pink-year colour’: “Classical blue, bronze, green is a super-nice colour and will always be a super-nice colour. Getting something interesting for the long term, that’s the difficult thing”.
‘Something interesting for the long term’ is a phrase that could have been tailor-made for top replica Panerai watches, Italio-Swiss pioneers of substantial dive watches. Panerai often makes its luxury Panerai copy watches in interesting materials, but seldom in shouty colours – one may scan its boutique windows and find plenty of deep blacks, interesting greys and, indeed, super-nice greens but not much for fans of pink dials or ghosts.
Its latest offering along these lines is a version of its perfect replica Panerai Luminor Marina watches known as the Milan Edition. Released in handsome shaded blue, it is said to echo its connections to the sea.
An exercise in classical good taste, the 44mm 1:1 Panerai super clone watches comes in a steel DLC, or diamond-like-carbon, case with a high-contrast dial and a matching blue strap made of recycled PET materials.
Produced in a limited run of 319 and waterproof to 300m, it ties in to a new Panerai boutique at 19 Via Montenapoleone in Milan.
Like the AAA Panerai fake watches online, the two-floor retail space is stylishly restrained and unshowy – a symphony of dark wood and green, blue and black marble and minimalistic ceiling lighting.
“The inspiration behind the design was the city itself,” says creative director Alvaro Maggini. “It’s elegance, and timeless beauty.”
The store follows New York as part of its ambitious rollout of new ‘Casa Panerai’ boutiques across the world.
All of which shows you there is still a healthy audience for what might be called ‘old school luxury’.
Or, as one commentator has already put it on a watch forum, it is emblematic of ‘everything I like about Panerai’.