光阴荏苒 隽永流金

Classic Atlas Collection

When it was built at the time of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Tiffany & Co. 5th Avenue flagship store, with its ‘Ameri- can Deco’architecture of flat, sparsely de- ta il ed su rf ac es an d ext en si ve us e of br ush ed a nd bri ght- pol ish ed stai nle ss steel, set an appropriate tone for Tiffany’s design evolution in the later part of the 20th century.The Tiffany building has a clock on its facade, the famous Atlas Clock to be precise, which has graced the facades of Tiffany stores since 1853, when Charles Tiffany moved his thriving business in lower M anhattan into a larger space at 550 Broadway and felt his new location needed image signage. Between the windows of the new store’s second story he installed a distinctive Atlas figure bearing a clock-rather than ‘the weight of the world’-on his shoulders. Twenty-four years ago, when in 1980, Tiffany & Co. set off on the creation of an ‘image’ watch, the clean- lined American Deco architecture of the Tiffany building as well as its old image clock were foremost in the company’s thoughts. So out of the Tiffany ‘back to basics’ philosophy and the Tiffany love of refining rather than sophisticating, a watch so new was born that it received a patent from the U.S. P atent Office in Washington-a recognition given only to totally new inven- tions-such as the Atlas Watch-a watch based on outdoor clock de- sign-the very old transform ed by the alchemy of Tiffany design into the very new.

When it was built at the time of the 1939 New York World＇s Fair, the Tiffany ＆ Co. 5th Avenue flagship store, with its ＇American Deco＇architecture of flat, sparsely detailed surfaces and extensive use of brushed and bright-polished stainless steel, set an appropriate tone for Tiffany＇s design evolution in the later part of the 20th century.