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To mark our ninth anniversary, we’re introducing the MING 57.05 Comet, a new worldtime watch built for the realities of life across time zones.
The 57.05 features a first-of-its-kind, patent-pending system for adjusting the worldtime to account for daylight saving time (DST). Built around our fifth-generation design language, it revisits one of our favorite complications in a new 40mm stainless-steel format and is also our most accessible worldtime watch to date.
The 57.05 Comet takes its name from the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner. We have always been fascinated by the engineering and style of early
commercial aviation. The same era also saw Geneva-based watchmaker Louis Cottier develop a worldtime system for wristwatches that would define the complication for
generations. Entering passenger service with the British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1952, the de Havilland Comet helped usher in the jet age and a new era of international travel, making it possible to go faster and farther in an increasingly interconnected world. Today, with the MING team spread across four countries and several regions of the world, international travel is less a romantic notion for us than a practical necessity.* The 57.05 Comet is our contemporary take on a complication born for exactly this kind of world.
* Suffice it to say, our collective relationship with airport lounges is complicated.
A Different Approach to DST
Traditional worldtime watches work beautifully with standard time. Daylight saving time
complicates the picture. A conventional 24-hour worldtime display shows the standard time
across the world’s major cities at a glance, but seasonal changes still leave you accounting
for the extra hour yourself.
Our solution is mechanical, tactile, and deliberately simple.
The cities featured on the 57.05 Comet are divided according to whether they observe
daylight saving time. Cities unaffected by DST remain fixed on the inner bezel, while those
that observe it are positioned on a separate outer bezel. Rotating the outer bezel a single
click, exactly 15 degrees, moves only the relevant cities forward by one hour against the 24-
hour scale.
The bezel locks positively into either its standard-time or DST position using a spring-loaded
ball and corresponding recesses beneath the bezel. A small aperture labeled DST ON,
positioned between eight and nine o’clock on the bezel, provides an immediate visual
confirmation: silver for standard time and red for DST.
Distinct grip points are machined into the edge of the outer bezel, making the DST
adjustment easier to execute and giving the mechanism a more deliberate, tactile feel.
With a single click, our patent-pending system adjusts the cities that observe daylight saving
time without disturbing those that don’t. No spreadsheets, calculators, or mild existential
confusion required.
A Dial That Refuses to Sit Still
The worldtime display isn’t the only part of the 57.05 Comet that changes with time.
At the center of the watch is a multilayered blue dial with overlapping raster structures that
create an animated interference pattern we call the Comet Tail.
A raster is a repeating grid of lines or openings. When two such grids overlap, small changes
in their alignment create much larger visual patterns. As the relationship between the layers
gradually shifts, the dial appears to flow and evolve over the course of the day rather than
presenting a single static texture.
The result? A dial that reveals something different with nearly every glance.
Surrounding the central dial is the rotating 24-hour indication. At night, the entire display
changes character again. The handset uses blue-emission Super-LumiNova X1, while the 24-
hour scale uses blue emission for daytime hours and orange for nighttime hours. When
daylight saving time is active, the DST ON indicator dot will also glow red in the dark.
Above the dial, the floating box-style top crystal is laser-engraved and filled with our
proprietary MING Polar White luminous material, creating white-emission markers for the
primary 12-hour indices.
Case, Calibre & Construction
The 57.05 Comet belongs to our fifth-generation design language, recognizable by its triple-
stepped lug architecture.
The 40mm × 10.3mm case is machined from 316L stainless steel, combining Art Deco
references with the more sculptural forms of our latest aesthetic framework.
Nowhere is that clearer than the lugs. No fewer than nine individual components are required for the lug construction alone.
This multi-piece approach allows adjacent surfaces to receive sharply differentiated brushed and polished finishes that would be impossible to achieve with the same definition using conventional case construction.
For all of that complexity, the 57.05 remains a watch intended to travel. The case offers 100
meters of water resistance and is paired with either a cobalt blue goat leather strap from
Jean Rousseau Paris or our signature MING Polymesh in titanium.
The sapphire crystal exhibition caseback reveals the self-winding Sellita for MING calibre
330.M2, offering approximately 50 hours of power reserve. The movement features
skeletonized bridges with brushed finishing and an anthracite coating, set over a matching
anthracite-coated baseplate.
Limited to 200 pieces.