Compared to other well established brands in the watch world today, Nomos is still valued as a fairly young addition to the watch industry. Conceived in 1991, its founder Roland Schwertner finally put Nomos on the map with the creation of the Tangente just a year later. Renowned for its stark characteristics and aesthetically pleasing clean face, Schwertner, together with his designer Susanne Gunther incorporated the traditional sunburst decorations and central hours and minutes hands that are clearly recognized as the brand’s trademark, to produce a brave new design.
The Tangente Datum (with date) contains features such as Nomos’ in-house manual-wind – Beta movement, their Alpha calibre and what is claimed as a “Long distance date function” which can be seen from far away. With a slightly larger face than those without the datum, Nomos remain true to their core values in that the diameter of the watch face at 37.5mm is still smaller than many of those overpowering the market today. The Tangente has become so special to watch collectors because of its genesis. The model was shaped on one arts and crafts school in particular. Born in 1919 in Weimar, Germany – the Bauhaus movement was the influential schooling body responsible for encouraging sculptors, artists, painters and architects to expand on their creative potential by developing and reforming their skills through new forms of education. Predominantly, Schwertner shared an interest in these transformations within the art industry and the effects that these changes would have on future education within Germany’s society. His objective – to combine a typography style onto the watch face to produce something historic and rather out of fashion which then inevitably became ahead of its time! With tempered blue steel hands that sit neatly on a silver plated, galvanized white dial, it would be a shame not to own this watch in sapphire exhibition caseback.
In total, Nomos have won over 100 awards for their creative designs including finishing first three times with the Metro, the Tangomat and the Lambda deep blue models just last month! With brand recognition for Nomos now at its highest, Germany’s ownership of such an invaluable and unique watch-making house in the town of Glashutte is now being admired on a huge scale in other parts of Europe and in the United States.