Nicolas Sarkozy isn't the only French icon warming up to the U.S. The 150-year-old watch brand LIP is following suit by reintroducing its Mach 2000 and Revival Seventies collections and bringing them stateside. These futuristic designs first made their mark in Paris three decades ago when LIP, struggling to stay alive, bought more time with a revolutionary series of watches from the great French architects, interior decorators, and designers, industrial and graphic, of the day. The reissue of the asymmetrical Dark Master Chronograph by Roger Tallon, who also designed the high-speed French TGV trains, stays true to form, while the Mythic Jump Hour has been revamped by LIP's new guard, 30-year-old Prisca Briquet. (She pulled the curtain on the wizard, opening the face to reveal the dials Tallon had left to the imagination.) French-made with Swiss movements, the models are higher quality than ever before, featuring mineral glass and aluminum casing. "They were ahead of their time, then and now," says Mitch Greenblatt, watchismo.com blogger and the only distributor of the brand in the U.S. "It's a bad pun, but it really is true."

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