As I’m sure you’ve started to surmise from the theme of this week, the ’90s were a strange time for watchmaking and it was an era that forced many brands back to the drawing board. Even those that had seemingly survived the quartz crisis now found themselves facing an audience of somewhat diminished enthusiasm, especially from the collector’s perspective. This included 1:1 UK Patek Philippe replica watches, one of the most hallowed brands in watchmaking, and it quickly had to consider what was next and how it could shape its offerings to engage with a wider and more commercially viable audience. An audience that had seen watchmaking watered down to its breaking point over the previous generation but appeared to be back, and crucially, with cash in hand.
So, in the early ’90s, Patek Philippe looked at its lineup and saw something of a hole between the roughly $9,000 it charged for a basic Calatrava and the $45,000 it asked for a perpetual calendar like the 3940. As such, Patek’s leadership decided it needed a practical complication that didn’t cost as much as a perpetual, in looking to fill that space in their lineup, so they created something brand new – annual calendar fake watches for sale.
That’s right, the annual calendar does not date back to some bygone era of Louis Breguet, pocketwatches, or the longitude problem. On the contrary, this specific calendar complication is about as old as the Nintendo 64, DVDs, Ask Jeeves, and pop culture touchpoints like Independence Day and Alanis Morisette’s Ironic. To be more specific, the first known execution of annual calendar replica watches wholesale was released by Patek Philippe at the 1996 Baselworld fair.
Despite being a complication built to thread the needle of a specific price point for a specific type of buyer, the first annual calendar copy watches paypal – the reference 5035 – was nothing short of a massive achievement in both movement design and the greater commercialization of Patek Philippe. To find new territory, the brand needed a new watch, and the 5035 offered the sheen of complicated watchmaking with a price tag that was significantly less eye-watering than a classic high-end complication.
To explain what I mean, I suppose we need to start with the ideals of an annual calendar complication. The calendar complication is one of many derivations but great attention is given to how little a given movement has to be corrected for the somewhat asymmetrical nature of our monthly calendar. As I hope you are very much aware, months don’t all have the same number of days, and then let’s not forget the power of the leap year.
High quality replica watches with a date can track 31 days per month (possibly also with a day display) but will require some sort of adjustment for any month with less than 31 days. Adding complexity, we find the traditional triple calendar, which can show the month, day, and date, but the day and date display will need correction, similar to that of the date-only wristwatch.
Then, we jump all the way to a perpetual calendar, where the best fake watches is able to account not just for the four months of the year that have only 30 days but also for the leap year cycle and how it pertains to February having either 28 or 29 days. Perpetual calendars are wonderful and wonderfully complicated, which means they are expensive and, should they fall out of phase with reality (like if you don’t keep it wound), often require a fussy process to reset the many points of the calendar. This is where the annual calendar comes into play.
For an annual calendar, you basically get a perpetual calendar that no longer factors for leap year or for the Gregorian annoyances of February. You have a calendar complication that can automatically account for 30-day months but will require an active adjustment when February becomes March. At a technical level, annual calendars are considerably less complicated than a QP (that’s a perpetual calendar) and are thus considerably less costly to produce. For the end user, an annual calendar is also quite a bit easier to set, and, for those who wear theirs with enough frequency, the date adjustment at the end of February is seen as a small compromise in a user experience that seeks to mimic much of what a QP brings to one’s wrist.
So, while the full-fat QP remains the king of the calendar, the 1996 arrival of Patek’s annual calendar complication meant that the brand could offer complicated calendar fake watches for men to those who were too cost-sensitive to pony up for a perpetual while at the same time were demanding more haute horologerie than a three-hand Calatrava could deliver.
When it was released, Patek enjoyed considerable fanfare for the 5035, especially at a Baselworld fair that was not seen as being especially positive for complicated precious metal watches. Numbers were down and the only safe bet at the time was steel perfect replica watches. This is according to numbers published by Europa Star in 1996, showing an increased growth of 48.6 percent (for steel watches) during the first four months of the year despite a 1.9 percent fall in exports for the Swiss watch and clock market in the first four months of 1995.
At this time, Patek Philippe was run by Philippe Stern and he had the unenviable task of navigating the brand through an era in which many of its peers and competitors were grasping at straws and attempting to push upmarket for what seemed like fast, complication-driven cash. As a result, Stern cut production of complicated Swiss made super clone watches as a response to the actions of those who didn’t have an eye on the long-term effect of eroding exclusivity (again, this was reported by Europa Star in a 1996 profile of Stern for the 5035’s release – but these tactics sound familiar, no?).
To help fill market demand, the end result was this “serviceable complication” (Stern’s own words), aka, the 5035 Annual Calendar and its automatically-wound Caliber 315 S QA. Designed in-house via Patek’s R&D team, the 315 is notable because they managed to build the annual calendar functionality off that of the base date complication.
As mentioned by both Europa Star (1996, issue 218) and in Collectability’s excellent timeline of China fake Patek Philippe annual calendar watches, the design of the 315 sought to replace the cams, jumpers, and levers common to complicated calendar functions (like that of a QP) with wheels and pinions. As such, the calendar function of the 315 uses a 24-hour wheel with two fingers to advance the date, one that is active for months with 31 days, and another additional finger that is active for April, June, September, and November.
Those months have 30 days and, when the time came, the system would advance from 30 to 31 to 1 over the course of about four hours. The setup of the calendar was also fairly straightforward, with a trio of correctors set flush in the case sides that allow the user to advance the date, day, or month display as needed (ideally, just on March 1st). Interestingly, the 315 was designed to show the date via an aperture at six (rather than via a hand) and also managed central seconds and a 24-hour subdial just above the date.
“This was one of several steps that took place in the ’80s and ’90s that began the commercialization of Haute Horologerie,” Ben Clymer told me when I asked him about the collector’s perspective on the 5035.”An annual calendar was pitched as a highly complex mechanism, and it is relative to a simple calendar, but it is several leagues beneath a full perpetual in terms of, well, just about everything.”
Interestingly, despite being a more simple and more easily manufactured movement than a perpetual calendar, the 315 required more components than the movement found in the 3940 and all of this functionality came together inside a 37mm-wide case that was just 11mm thick. With a display caseback, the 5035 would eventually be offered in the usual precious metals, but never in steel. Top replica Patek Philippe watches nerds will note the use of “IV” rather than “IIII” for the roman numerals on the dial and nerd nerds will note the inclusion of luminous hands and in-fill for the numerals.
While certainly a classic and traditional enough layout, I’d venture to say that the 5035 was not one of Patek’s most successful dial designs, especially when compared to its handsome big brother of the era, the 3940 Perpetual Calendar. Housed in a lovely case, the 5035 had a pair of day and month subdials set high above the central dial line, a smaller 24-hour dial centered in the lower half of the dial, and then a basic cut-out for the date set at the dial’s edge at six o’clock.
Where, as mentioned above, a 3940 might have set you back around $45,000 in the late ’90s, the 5035 started at $17,500 (as per Collectability). With it, and alongside a plan that limited production of its flagship complicated best quality fake watches, the 5035 forged a new path for Patek Philippe that blended traditional Swiss watchmaking with an increased need for commercialization in the 1990s.
Back in the day, the release of the 5035 was a big deal. Stern himself called 1996 “the best Patek Philippe exhibition ever” (Europa Star, 1996, Issue 218). Not long after, the 5035 won “Swiss Watch of the Year” from the publication Montre Passion.
By 1998, the ref. 5036 added a power reserve indication and a moonphase. The 5035 ended production in late 2004, after which it was replaced in 2005 by the 5146 which was similar but benefited from a more refined design and updated 39mm case sizing.
Over time, Patek Philippe replica watches shop continued to employ the annual calendar and it’s hard to write a story like this without mentioning the deeply cool ref. 5960, which combined the calendar complication with a flyback chronograph and a very sporty aesthetic. Announced alongside the 5960 in 2006 was the ref. 5396, which blended the annual calendar function into a drop-dead gorgeous model formed around a Calatrava case with a dial showing a pair of apertures for day and month, and an aperture at six for the date (something of a nod to the 5035, I think, alongside the obvious inspiration from the 3448).
So the 5035 was a massive release for Patek Philippe back in the day, but how does that translate to how the model is seen by modern collectors? Truth be told, when you factor in the somewhat off-balance dial design and the model’s impetus as an accessible take on an exclusive piece of high-end watchmaking, the collector market has been stable but not exactly red hot when it comes to the 5035.
Modern pricing runs in the $25-$35k range and legacy auction performance would support a similar delta (though without a perceived correction for inflation). If you’re keen, don’t sleep on my favorite iterations, white gold with either a salmon dial or the nicely-matched silver-tone dial.
If you’re looking for something closer to peak value, back in 2014, Christie’s offered a special edition of the 5035 made of 18k white gold in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Singapore-based retailer Sincere Watch Limited. It sold for a modern equivalent of about ~$55,000 before the buyer’s premium.
While this is certainly up from the original list price, I think it’s safe to say that the 5035 has not enjoyed the same sort of pricing run-up we’ve seen with several other complicated fake watches store site from Patek Philippe in the vintage to near-vintage age range (not to mention some of the brand-new stuff). And really, given what we’ve covered above, I think that makes sense.
As something of a marketing compromise for the changing landscape of the ’90s, the 5035 marked a crucial moment of innovation and creativity for Patek, but it also came at a time when the old guard of watch enthusiasm was shifting into a new online world.
As the resulting twenty-plus years have seen a massive increase in worldwide watch enthusiasm, the compromises of the 5035 can feel out-of-plan for a brand like Patek Philippe, especially from the perspective of the purists.”There are some people who, in period, felt it was beneath Patek to be making such a watch,” Ben Clymer told me of the era. Understanding that, and operating from a non-purist perspective, I think the 5035 is a reference you should know and one that demands merit, both for what it signaled in its era and for its technical achievements.
I also spoke with John Reardon, HODINKEE alum and the guy behind the Patek-obsessed Collectability.com, who said, “Although at first the ref. 5035 was met with ‘shock and awe’ by the collecting community, it soon became a staple in the Patek Philippe line and remained in production for almost a decade. It has aged well and is now recognized as one of the most 1990s of designs, aesthetically and mechanically. Interestingly, the word ‘value’ has become synonymous with the ref. 5035 and this holds true today as much as it did 25 years ago.”
When the 5035 was originally released, Patek Philippe was granted a 25-year patent (No. CH685585G) that protected the design from external replication. As these things often go, other brands soon found a way to replicate the functionality while circumventing the manner in which Patek went about the original complication. Today, annual calendars are available from A. Lange & Söhne, IWC, F.P. Journe, Rolex, Blancpain, Ulysse Nardin, and even as a complication for the Nautilus, the 2022 ref. 5326G, and as part of a Grand Complication in Patek Philippe’s ref. 5033 Minute Repeater.
In little more time than the scope of the original patent, the idea of a useful and affordable complication proved appealing to a wide range of brands, both within the confines of Haute Horlogerie and otherwise. And, while the 5035 might have seemed like a strange commercial move for luxury Swiss Patek Philippe replica watches in the ’90s – the technical execution, industry leadership, and market effect of their annual calendar innovation manage to feel very much on-brand some 26 years later.