When Swatch hit the big three-O in March 2013, the fashion-watch phenomenon commandeered an entire floor of the Baselworld trade fair, filling it with every single one of their 5,000-or-so watches. Something big was going to happen, and it sure did: the Sistem51. A £100 watch, which became the talk of a town more used to £10,000 price tags.

Like its legendary plastic forebear, Sistem51 sticks to (surprise, surprise) 51 parts, but – amazingly – it’s now a purely mechanical watch, rather than battery-powered quartz, with all of its cogs mounted on a single screw. Oh, and it’s made entirely by robots in a way like no other.

Some were, and remain snobbish about its plastic micro-mechanics, but you can’t help but goggle at the achievement of creating a self-winding movement with less than half the usual parts, packing 90 hours of power reserve (the norm is around 40), plus claiming an accuracy of +/-7 seconds a day – almost precise enough to earn ‘chronometer’ status, of which Rolex, Omega and Breitling all boast.

Now available in steel ‘Irony’ guise, for a dressier look, Sistem51 is the anti-fashion fashion watch: defiantly sophisticated, deliberately anarchic. It’s peerless, unprecedented, as future-forward as fashion-forward, yet entrenched in Swiss tradition.

How The Swatch Sistem51 Came To Be

All the bubblegum designs, artist collabs and down-with-the-kids marketing aside, people forget how revolutionary the Swatch watch was. Far from being just another trendy fad of the 80s, Swatch was conceived in response to a severe (in the watch world, at least) crisis: from the early ’70s onwards, handmade mechanical watches were being threatened with obsolescence by cheap, mass-produced quartz watches pouring out of the Far East. Even James Bond had discarded his Rolex for a Seiko digital.