One of the hardest lines for watch brands at the top of the industry to toe is the ever-fine balance between Haute Horlogerie and “accessible” timepieces. In most brands, there are collections that serve to be the entry-level ranges and others that are often the home ground of grand complications and high-level timepieces with exorbitant price tags to match. The contrast between the two collections as such is therefore normally vast, and don’t usually share the same design theories or principles.
This is why Girard-Perregaux‘s entire collection at SIHH this year surprised us. Instead of the usual distinction between collections, the brand’s offerings this year shared a unifying theme of “Earth to Sky,” with colours and functions used to portray that.
A close up of the SIHH 2019 Girard Perregaux Bridges Cosmos
How the Girard Perregaux Bridges Cosmos appears in the twilight, cast only in the light of its own illumination.
The grand expression of that theme is found in its Girard-Perregaux Bridges Cosmos, a stunner of a watch that sees the brand’s iconic bridge holding up a tourbillon at six o’clock and an off-centre dial that indicates the hours and minutes at 12 o’clock.
But where the real focus is on the watch are the two globes at three and six o’clock. On the right side of the dial sits a terrestrial globe that serves as a day/night indicator as well as a GMT function with a 24-hour scale along the equator. The globe is a scale model of the earth, allowing you to tell if the local area is currently experiencing day or night, depending on where you sit. At nine o’clock, another impressive globe is placed. This blue-tinted titanium model, however, sees a laser-engraved sky chart adorn it. This globe rotates every 23 hours, 58 minutes and 4 seconds – the exact duration of sidereal time, effectively being a timelapse of the sky above us.
While the watch is exemplary of Girard-Perregaux’s ability to create haute horlogerie timepieces and develop complications at the highest level, the brand has also afforded the same theme albeit more in aesthetics with its Laureato and 1966 collections too.
In general, the brand’s entire collection for SIHH 2019 sees a dark black and blue theme, with the black DLC titanium cases making an interesting background for the blue dials. While the reveal isn’t exactly unprecedented (IWC’s 150th anniversary being the most recent that had a singular theme across every piece released), it could be an interesting strategy going forward for other brands.
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