Yet the 1980s can generally be seen as a halcyon period for wristwatches – and not only thanks to the spring-driven sector’s bounce-back from the battery-driven industry that had threatened to decimate the public’s appetite for mechanical movements. So while the quartz craze had seen kids go barmy for cartoony Swatches, precociously soul-crushed adolescents wearing nerdy-chic calculator watches (an early precursor to the current wearable-tech phenomenon) and Southern Californian surfers opting for zany, multi-coloured Shark watches, sophisticated grown-ups began enjoying the classier spoils of horology with renewed vigour.

Watches that were all the rage included those by Bulgari, which only began in earnest in 1980 with the founding of the Italian company’s Swiss watchmaking arm Bulgari Time (although the Bulgari Bulgari had actually waltzed onto the scene, flaunting the conspicuousness watch-face branding that would become Bulgari’s horological trademark, three years before the 1970s came to a close). So wild a success did the group’s horological output become in the 1980s, it opened stores in Munich, London, Milan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.

Around the same time, Gucci’s minimalist pieces with numberless faces, two-tone cases and plain black leather bands, along with Breitling’s authentically nautical Yachting pieces, joined the ranks of the finest watches worn on the wrists of the stylistically forward-thinking. Then there’s the timely intervention in the contemporary scene of Ferdinand A. Porsche. It was 1978 when the designer of the original 911 joined forces with IWC Schaffhausen to create a compass-watch combo, which would become just the first of many high-functioning cases fashioned from non-allergenic titanium throughout the 1980s.

To be Franck

But perhaps the greatest boon to haute horlogerie around this time came with an abrupt deepening of the talent pool when Franck Muller graduated from the Watchmaking School of Geneva in 1980 and, having further cut his teeth by restoring more than 80 pocket watches belonging to the Patek Philippe Private Collection, spent the rest of the decade designing highly complex, avant-garde timepieces under the name “Franck Muller Geneve”. Robin Williams, Demi Moore and Elton John are amongst the ardent devotees he picked up during the decade.

It wasn’t just timepieces made during the decade itself that made the 1980s a horologically fruitful one. Margaret Thatcher, while terrorising junior ministers with her shoulder-padded outfits and black Asprey handbag, would enhance her steely elegance with a vintage Piaget circular-dial model with dot numerals and polished bezel or a similar-styled Cartier.

Thatcher’s ideological soulmate and platonic paramour Ronald Reagan was, like every president since, presented with a Vulcain Cricket by Finnish jewellery mogul Keijo Paajanen. Whether it ever replaced his beloved Rolex Datejust is lost in the ether – Reagan is joined by Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, George Bush Snr and Jimmy Carter as White House-occupying Rolex fans. And showing the broad appeal of the brand, Rolex was also favoured by boxer Mike Tyson, rocker Ozzy Osbourne and comedian Eddie Murphy who all sported Day-Dates during the decade on which we’re focusing.

The Crowned Kings of Hollywood

A host of movie actors surfing the zeitgeist in the 1980s also had the Rolex bug – both in reality and in character mode – as typified by Richard Gere’s two-tone Datejust with Jubilee bracelet (later worn in Pretty Woman), the Rolex “Root Beer” GMT Master that Clint Eastwood wore through a string of 1980s flicks (Firefox and Tightrope among them) and Harrison Ford’s steel Rolex Datejust Jubilee, which got a pretty good showing in Roman Polanski’s French mystery thriller Frantic. Sylvester Stallone’s also got a good public flaunting, not least in one Rocky III promotional still in which it pokes out of his pinstripe jacket as he squares up to Mr T.

Techno Club

Of course, top-grade luxury pieces would look more than a little ex situ in sci-fi movies: hence Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and his Casio CA-50 (an example of the aforementioned calculator watch), Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and his Seiko A826, the Seiko Voice Note worn by three of the Ghostbusting quartet and Sigourney Weaver’s Seiko Speedtimer in Aliens (Arnold Schwarzenegger is also a fan of the Japanese makers, as evidenced in Predator, Running Man, Raw Deal and Commando).

Our hope here at Revolution is that one of the Swiss timepiece giants one day actually incarnates this batshit piece into reality – if only as a tongue-in-cheek toast to one of the most horologically fertile decades of the past century.