Four of the six pieces watch the conversion happen. In The Second-Order System, a Tudor centenary spread fastens a hundred-year-old brand to a 1935 altitude record, and Barthes supplies the manual for how the join is made — how a decision taken by a marketing department in 2026 is restaged as an eternal essence. The Past, Acquired follows a 1969 Contograf into the Eberhard museum and asks what a company archive is actually for, once the archive has begun returning as product. The Old Machine, Repriced considers a genuine, never-assembled Valjoux 72 that Singer has finished well beyond its industrial station and priced at CHF 23,000 — restoration promoted to a luxury category of its own. And The Price That Arrived First meets a serious twenty-four-year-old independent whose €16,000 debut asks the market to price authorship before it has had time to accumulate.

Each is a study in the same sleight: the facts are real, and the arrangement does the selling.

Against those four, two longer pieces set the frame. Mania and Method, excerpted from Against the Grain, revisits the last time the whole edifice inflated on the logic of toujours plus — larger cases, multiplying tourbillons, climbing prices — until 2008 arrived to audit it, and marks the independents who were quietly practising subtraction while everyone else added. And Preserving the Final Moment is the control case: a patient account of the remontoir d’égalité, the constant-force mechanism that guards the last stretch of a watch’s energy. It is the one thing in this issue that no story is doing the work for. Remove the myth, the heritage, the invoice, and something is still there — exact by design.

Which is the test this publication keeps returning to. Subtract what was decided from what was described, and see what is left standing.

The Editor.

The next issue will be published on September 27, 2026.

The poles have first been simplified. “Microbrand” becomes shorthand for outsourced production, accessible pricing and borrowed components; “haute horlogerie” becomes the opposite condition, where handwork, scarcity and authorship justify admission to a higher order. Real watchmaking is messier than this. But once the field has been reduced to two caricatures, an emerging independent can appear to transcend both simply by being small, artisanal and expensive.

Berets has genuine grounds for resisting the lower pole. He trained at the Korpela & Hofs Watchmaking Competence Centre in Le Locle, where his school watch became the prototype for Series 1. In his account to Monochrome, he describes manually machining bridges, the mainplate and motion-work components, then finishing the movement himself. In the production watch he makes the German-silver three-quarter plate, bridges, screws, locating pins and click system, as well as the dial and some components behind it. This is not catalogue assembly disguised as authorship. It is watchmaking.

But it is not yet the opposite pole either.

The Series 1 is a time-only watch in a 316L stainless-steel case. There is no complication to change the mechanical proposition, no precious-metal case to move the material proposition upward, and the Series 1 material identifies no collaboration with an established artist whose authorship might introduce another source of scarcity or cultural value. Its design language is restrained, rectangular and consciously classical: minimalism filtered through an Art Deco vocabulary that watchmaking has used for generations. Berets makes the arrangement his own through details—the crown at twelve, the tension between symmetry and asymmetry, the surface treatments, the two tonal personalities—but the underlying visual grammar is inherited rather than unprecedented. The watch asks originality to reside in inflection.

At €16,000 excluding tax, inflection has to carry considerable weight.

The movement makes the question more interesting, not less. Berets describes it as an “in-house caliber based on the Peseux 7001.” That formulation is technically more defensible than the cynical reading it invites. According to Berets himself, the Peseux 7001 still provides much of the movement’s functional core—the gear train, escapement, balance, and winding and setting system—while Berets manufactures much of the architecture presented to the eye through the caseback, including the three-quarter plate, bridges, screws, locating pins and click system. The movement is therefore substantially reworked, particularly in its visible architecture, without becoming fully proprietary. Yet the distinction remains important because Berets has also said that he is developing a fully in-house calibre for a future project. The language itself acknowledges a threshold that Series 1 has not crossed.

Nor does the exhibition back entirely dissolve that ambiguity. The three-quarter-plate architecture gives Berets a large surface on which to demonstrate his own making and finishing, but by definition it also covers much of the mechanism underneath. What is displayed is authorship, not mechanical totality. It simply cannot do all the work that the phrase in-house is increasingly asked to do.

This is where neither-norism becomes useful. The Series 1 is offered as neither the ordinary microbrand watch nor the institutional manufacture piece: independent, hand-finished, limited, personal. The Limited Edition describes “in-house movement re-engineering” and a balance of contemporary styling with classical presence. Such phrases do not falsify the object. They naturalize its position. A set of commercial decisions—small production, extensive handwork, selective remanufacture, steel, time-only mechanics, €16,000—begins to read as proportion itself, as though this combination naturally occupies the space between accessible microbrand and haute horlogerie.

It does not. A market position is being chosen.

Twenty pieces of Oscuro and twenty of Levante are planned, and low-volume hand production is expensive. Berets is also doing work that most start-up founders cannot do themselves. Those facts explain a substantial premium over an industrial watch using the same underlying calibre. They do not, on their own, make €16,000 inevitable. At that level the collector is being asked to price more than labour. He is being asked to price authorship before it has accumulated, design language before it has become recognisable, continuity before the atelier has had time to demonstrate it, and future mechanical independence before the announced fully in-house calibre exists.

This is not unique to Berets. It is a recurring temptation among ambitious watch start-ups: to enter the haut-de-gamme from the price end. Traditionally, price was supposed to emerge from accumulated reputation, difficult mechanics, costly materials, exceptional artistic input, or some combination of them. The newer sequence can run in reverse. Set the price in the territory of the established independent, then allow the price itself to tell the buyer how seriously the object should be read.

Expensiveness becomes evidence of importance.

The collector is invited into the same middle. He need not be the mass-market buyer choosing an interchangeable microbrand, nor the conventional client buying a famous name at a famous price. He can become the person who saw the talent early. The premium purchases proximity to the maker, rarity, handwork and the possibility of being proved right later. This is a powerful form of collector psychology because it converts uncertainty into discernment. What has not yet been established becomes precisely what the early patron is congratulated for recognising.

That does not make the patron foolish. Berets may become exactly the watchmaker that Series 1 asks the market to anticipate. His technical seriousness is evident, his willingness to manufacture components manually is unusual, and the project has more substance than its “microbrand” label suggests. The correct criticism is therefore not that the watch pretends to be haute horlogerie. It is that the pricing asks the market to settle the question too soon.

What makes this watch worth €16,000? The answer is not nothing. There is labour here, training, risk, hand-finishing, low production and a young watchmaker doing materially more than assembling other people’s parts.

But the scale still tips.

Series 1 belongs closer to the ambitious start-up than to the established haut-de-gamme manufacture it is priced beside. Steel. Time only. A familiar classical vocabulary. A deeply modified rather than fully proprietary calibre. No external artistic authorship to add another layer of value. None of these is a defect. Together they make €16,000 look less like the consequence of the object than a declaration about what Berets wants the object—and the name—to become.

The effort deserves attention. The position still needs earning.

Sergio Galanti

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Then came 2008.

The following preview combines passages from Chapter 4, “Mania and Method (2001–2010)”, with three watches examined in Chapter 5, “The Grand Exhibits (2001–2010)”. Together they show the two sides of the decade: an industry increasingly addicted to toujours plus, and independent watchmakers trying, in very different ways, to distinguish genuine invention from spectacle.

The passages have been rearranged for online reading. Footnotes and technical specification tables from the book have been omitted.

The Baroque Explosion

The independents charted their own course. The rest of the industry was racing towards a cliff.

By 2006, Swiss watch exports had reached 13.7 billion francs, an increase of 10.9% over the already exceptional previous year. The industry was now enjoying its third consecutive year of double-digit growth. The average export price of a Swiss mechanical watch had increased considerably in five years, climbing from 1,500 francs in 1999 to over 2,100 francs in 2005.

The numbers intoxicated everyone who touched them. In the corridors of Baselworld and the salons of the SIHH, the champagne flowed without pause. China was opening. Russia was booming. The Gulf states were building watch boutiques in shopping malls that rivalled European palaces. And everywhere, the message was the same: more, bigger, louder, richer.

Watch cases swelled to monstrous proportions, approaching fifty millimetres and beyond—dimensions that would have seemed grotesque a decade earlier but now signified masculine presence and financial arrival. Dials disappeared beneath pavements of diamonds. Materials proliferated: carbon fibre, ceramic, titanium, tantalum, meteorite, even wood and stone. Colours exploded across collections that had previously adhered to conservative palettes.

The tourbillon, already ubiquitous, began to multiply. If one tourbillon was impressive, surely two were more so? The double tourbillon appeared, then the triple. Carriages rotated on multiple axes—Franck Muller’s Revolution 2 (2003) featured a cage that rotated on two axes to compensate for gravity in all positions. The technical justifications grew strained, the prices astronomical.

Those few voices urging restraint warned that the industry had reached the crest of the baroque trend, and that it would ebb, leaving space for a return to classicism and moderation.

But who was listening? The numbers kept climbing. Every month brought new records. The retailers’ shelves groaned with inventory, but the pipeline remained full. There was always another market to open, another collector to cultivate, another price ceiling to shatter.

The haut de gamme had become, in the French phrase, toujours plus—always more. More complications, more materials, more size, more diamonds, more price. The logic was self-reinforcing: as average prices rose, brands were compelled to introduce ever-more-expensive models to maintain their position in the hierarchy. Those who could still think clearly asked whether the climbers realised that the higher they went, the smaller the stairs became, the scarcer the oxygen, and the less space there would be at the top.

Greubel Forsey — Double Tourbillon 30° (2004)

Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey had spent years perfecting complications for others—invisible hands shaping the mechanical hearts of prestigious houses that lacked the patience or expertise to develop them internally. Their workshop at CompliTime had become the place where brands sent problems they could not solve themselves. The two men understood, better than most, how thin the industry’s competence ran beneath its confident surface.

By 2004, when they unveiled their own brand at Baselworld, they chose to debut with something that made established houses look almost timid. The Double Tourbillon 30° was a mechanical manifesto. They had nested a 30-degree inclined cage, completing one revolution per minute, within a slower-rotating outer cage that turned every four minutes. Two axes of rotation. Two chances to compensate for gravity’s effects on timing. A level of intentional complexity most brands would not even whisper about, pursued with the devotion of true believers who had decided that precision itself could be a form of artistic expression.

The decade was awash in tourbillons. Every brand that could afford one seemed to be producing them, the complication reduced from technical achievement to marketing ornament. Greubel Forsey’s answer was not to abstain but to insist—to build a tourbillon so considered, so labour-intensive, that it could not be confused with the epidemic surrounding it.

The design was unapologetically architectural: a 43.5mm white-gold case, thick at around 15.7mm yet wear-balanced by lugged contours. The dial read as both complicated and elemental—industrial baroque, some called it. The 72-hour power reserve sustained the complex mechanism without demanding constant attention.

The finishing elevated technical achievement into art. Hand-polished bevels caught light at angles that revealed hours of patient work. Frosted surfaces contrasted with mirror-bright flanks. Each bridge announced its maker’s philosophy: that decoration and function were not opposites but partners. The attention extended to components invisible in normal wear—a commitment to integrity that only a caseback removal would reveal.

Between 2004 and 2010, only 144 pieces emerged. The watch existed for conviction rather than convenience. It invited collectors to witness the ballet of its cages, to respect its intention, and to understand that true luxury can—and sometimes must—be an intellectual act.

H. Moser & Cie — Perpetual 1 (2005)

The perpetual calendar, as traditionally executed, resembles a cockpit instrument panel. Subdials multiply. Apertures crowd the dial. Information competes for attention. The whole point, it seems, is to display complexity with maximum visual evidence.

When H. Moser & Cie relaunched in 2005, their flagship Perpetual 1 took the opposite approach. The dial seemed almost deceptively blank—no subdials, no visual clutter. A large date window, a subtle arrow-hand for months, a discreet power-reserve indicator. The leap-year indication? Cast onto the caseback, where only the wearer would ever see it.

In a decade of baroque accumulation—oversized cases, exposed movements, complications stacked for the pleasure of stacking them—the Perpetual 1 arrived like a whispered rebuke. It asked what a perpetual calendar was actually for, then removed everything that did not serve the answer.

At the 2006 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the Perpetual 1 won the Complication category—rewarded for its radical simplification of a traditionally crowded complication. Sometimes the most revolutionary act is subtraction.

The in-house HMC 341 movement, designed by Andreas Strehler, delivered substance beneath the serenity: a seven-day power reserve from twin barrels, a patented flash-calendar mechanism that transitions instantly across month lengths, bidirectional date setting via the crown. While the industry fretted over supply chains and movement dependencies, Moser was quietly building the capability to stand alone. The interchangeable escapement module anticipated a future in which independence meant more than philosophy.

The fumé dials that would become Moser’s signature were already hinting at their potential here. Colours shifted with the light, gradients deepening towards the edges in ways that photography could never quite capture. A quiet seduction that revealed itself over time rather than demanding immediate attention.

The minimalism was refined intent, not absence. The Perpetual 1 attracted collectors who valued clarity, craftsmanship, and sincerity over subdial count. As the decade’s excesses accumulated around it, the watch began to look less like austerity and more like prophecy.

The Crash

The collapse began in September 2008 and accelerated through the following months with terrifying velocity. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The global financial system, riddled with toxic assets and overleveraged bets, was imploding. Credit froze. Wealth evaporated. The masters of the universe who had been the Swiss watch industry’s most enthusiastic customers found themselves unemployed, investigated, or desperately liquidating assets.

The watch industry, perched at the apex of discretionary spending, was among the first casualties.

January 2009: Swiss watch exports crashed 21.5%, a loss of 860,000 units and 227 million francs in a single month. The categories most affected were those that had been most inflated during the boom. Gold watches fell 23.3%. Platinum collapsed 36.7%.

No market was spared. The Chinese Eldorado shrank 42.6%. Singapore plummeted more than 60%. Russia, the darling of the boom years, crashed over 50%. Japan fell 24.2%. The United States, still the industry’s second-largest market, declined 28.5%.

The sell-in that had been pushed relentlessly through the pipeline during the boom years now sat, immovable, in retail windows around the world. Estimates suggested it would take years to work through the accumulated inventory. Discounts of 30%, 50%, even 80% appeared on watches that had been presented as precious collectibles mere months before. The grey market flourished as desperate retailers dumped products through any available channel.

It was much too easy to claim to be the mere victim of global forces. While the financial crash provided the spark, the watch industry had spent years building a tinderbox through its own house of cards. Carried away by myopia and fascinated by incredible margins, many watchmakers had acted like the frog in the fable by La Fontaine—expanding and over-leveraging until they were structurally primed to explode. Ultimately, the crisis arrived not just as an external shock, but as the inevitable reckoning for the industry’s own reckless choices.

The Terrain Revealed

By the end of 2009, Swiss watch exports totalled 13.2 billion francs — falling below the levels of 2006. Five years of sustained growth, from 2004 through 2008, had been erased. The expectation of perpetual expansion had been violently broken.

Yet the year of crisis saw an extraordinary wave of new manufacturing investments. Between September and November 2009, no fewer than nine inaugurations of new facilities or official groundbreakings took place in the watchmaking heartland—from the massive (Rolex breaking ground on a new manufacture in Bienne) to the intimate (Armin Strom completing a modest but well-equipped facility where the company could now produce almost all movement components in-house). The economic slowdown had helped in unexpected ways: machines arrived quickly, qualified personnel were available, and there was time to optimise quality rather than rush to market. Greubel Forsey inaugurated a new manufacture spectacularly inserted into the earth, flanked by a restored seventeenth-century farm, where cutting-edge CNC equipment sat alongside a hand-decoration department of fourteen employees—one quarter of the entire workforce—executing techniques that would have been familiar to eighteenth-century craftsmen.

The small independents were building foundations while the large groups were managing crises.

The geography of demand had shifted. China had risen to fourth place among export destinations, registering a 43.5% increase in December 2009 even as most other markets continued to decline. Combined with Hong Kong’s perpetual dominance, the Chinese-speaking world was becoming the industry’s centre of gravity. Russia, the darling market of the boom years, had collapsed from thirteenth place to eighteenth. The oligarchs who had been loading up on elaborate complications were selling, not buying.

Within this contracted market, a sorting had occurred. Brands with genuine heritage and loyal customer bases—Rolex above all, but also Patek Philippe, Omega, and others with decades of consistent positioning—had weathered the storm better than those who had chased trends. Among the independents, those who had maintained discipline emerged with their reputations enhanced. Those who had expanded too quickly or compromised too readily discovered that small size offered no automatic protection from the consequences of poor judgement.

The watch market had arrived at its saturation point. It had eaten too much, had become obese, and now it must thin down. The bazaar was closed.

De Bethune — DB28 (2010)

When De Bethune launched the DB28 in 2010, the lugs caught your attention before anything else: they seemed to float, to adapt, to refuse the rigidity that watch design usually demanded.

The case, crafted from grade-5 titanium, measured approximately 42.6mm in diameter yet a remarkably svelte 9.3mm thick. Its floating lugs—variable-geometry attachments that adapted to the wrist’s contour—were precision ergonomics, a rare gesture in an industry content with fixed solutions. At the 2011 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the DB28 captured the Aiguille d’Or—not through convention but by bending perspectives.

At six o’clock, the spherical moonphase—cast half in blued titanium, half in palladium—brought one of De Bethune’s signatures to the dial, achieving such precision that correction would be needed only every 122 years.

Inside, the DB2115 impressed: hand-wound, twin barrels delivering a six-day power reserve, its indication discreetly placed on the caseback; a patented silicon balance, De Bethune’s own flat overcoil hairspring, and a shock-resistant Triple Pare-Chute system.

The decade had seen materials multiply—titanium, ceramic, carbon fibre—deployed with varying degrees of seriousness. De Bethune had pursued the same vocabulary but with a researcher’s discipline. In Denis Flageollet’s workshop, silicon was not a borrowed innovation but a native one, developed through years of experimentation that most houses would have outsourced entirely. The heat-treatment that produced De Bethune’s signature blues emerged from controlled processes that fused science and craft at the molecular level.

Polished titanium cabochon hour markers orbited a concave chapter ring. Sapphire hour hands floated, allowing uninterrupted views of the bridge structure. The bold aesthetic was honesty rather than showboating. The design language—floating lugs, spherical moons, blue-flamed titanium—would recur across subsequent collections, each iteration refining but never abandoning the founding vision.

Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Independent Watchmaking follows the rise of Swiss independent watchmaking from the mechanical renaissance of the 1990s through the upheavals, experiments and market transformations that followed. Its central question is not simply how independent watchmakers survived, but what became possible because they remained independent.

Sergio Galanti

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Somewhere in a July 2026 watch-magazine spread, across four pages, a woman flies a biplane to 12,043 metres and a watch company turns a hundred years old. The spread would like you to feel these as one fact. Learning to watch the seam between them — to see the join being made — is the single most useful thing a reader of this publication can acquire, because the technique on display is not Tudor’s. It belongs to nearly every heritage campaign you will ever read, and Roland Barthes laid out its machinery in Mythologies in 1957 — the same year, as it happens, that one of the two watches photographed here was made.

Begin with what is literally on the page. Carina Massone Negrone became the first Italian woman to hold a pilot’s licence in 1933. In 1934 she set a women’s altitude record of 5,554 metres; on 20 June 1935 she reached 12,043 metres in a modified Caproni Ca.113, using training then reserved for military pilots. She owned Tudor watches — a Submariner and an Advisor, the latter from a line the article dates to 1957. The watches passed to her grandchildren. Tudor was founded in 1926. In 2026 the brand made a short film, hosted an evening at a museum, and launched a centenary watch, the Monarch, at €5,460.

Each of those is what Barthes calls a sign: a marriage of image and meaning that any competent reader decodes without effort. A photograph of a steel watch means “a steel watch.” This is the first-order system, the plane of denotation, and it is honest. Nothing in the list above is false. Hold onto that, because the honesty is not incidental to what follows — it is the raw material.

Myth, in Barthes’s account, is a second-order system. It does not invent new signs; it feeds on completed ones. It takes a finished first-order sign — the watch, the record, the founding date — and demotes it to a mere form, a hollow vessel, then pours in a new concept. The steel watch stops meaning “a steel watch” and starts meaning “Tudor-was-there-for-the-greatness.” The result of that pouring Barthes calls the signification: the naturalised whole you swallow without noticing you have swallowed anything. Crucially, the form is emptied but not destroyed. Its literal meaning is left standing at the edge of the frame, alive, available — because the myth will need it later as an alibi.

You can watch the emptying happen because the article, helpfully, dates its own materials against itself. The heroism is 1933–35. The only watch it can put a year to is 1957. And the caption that describes Tudor’s identity concedes that the brand built that identity “since the fifties,” on robustness and precision. So by the article’s own accounting, the essence it wants present at the 1935 altitude record did not yet exist as an essence in 1935. Twenty years separate the courage from the character. That gap is not a flaw in the piece; it is the location of the machinery. The heading over the spread — that “the time kept by Tudor accompanies one of the most extraordinary pages of Italian aviation” — and the line that “in many of her exploits, [time] was marked by a Tudor watch” ask you to cross that gap without noticing it is there. The text never quite asserts that a Tudor was on her wrist at 12,043 metres. It juxtaposes, it personifies the watch as a “discreet, almost silent companion,” and it lets continuity framing carry you the rest of the way.

This is naturalisation, Barthes’s central charge, and his definition is exact: myth transforms history into nature. A contingent commercial arrangement — a brand, in its centenary year, deciding to attach itself to a dead aviator — is restaged as an eternal essence that merely happened to find its incarnation in her. The tell is grammatical, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Watch for the agentless construction: “destinies destined to cross.” Whose decision crossed them? Tudor’s marketing department, in 2026. That agent is deleted and replaced by fate. Watch for essence verbs and continuity: “the same values that continue to define Tudor’s identity” — values posited as self-identical across a century, so that a new product and an old flight can be spoken of as one substance. Watch, above all, for ex-nomination, the erasure of a thing’s own name: a paid brand placement is renamed “a tribute,” and a product launch is dissolved into the passive — “a hundred years of history sublimated by the launch of the new Monarch” — as though no one launched it, as though history sublimated itself.

The single most elegant piece of myth in the spread is the scratch. “Every scratch on the case,” the text says, “tells a story of courage.” Denotatively a scratch is wear: knocks, decades, a watch kept in a drawer and taken out. The myth empties the scratch of its actual causes and refills it with courage, so that damage now reads as testimony. That is the whole operation performed on a single object, in one sentence — form hollowed, concept poured, signification served.

Perform the same subtraction on the larger frame and the erasure is graver. Record aviation in 1935 Italy was a state-instrumented arena; the military training the article mentions in passing sits inside that apparatus. The myth drains all of it and refills the vessel with brand-neutral “courage and vision.” History becomes nature; a specific, compromised, political history becomes a timeless quality you could bottle and sell.

And sell is the word, because the signification has a destination: the €5,460 Monarch. The completed myth transfers Negrone’s real defiance — of altitude, of gravity, of what a woman was permitted in 1930s Italy — onto a watch launched ninety years after her record, so that acquiring the object acquires a share of the defiance. She is kept at the edge of the frame throughout, close enough to guarantee the concept, far enough that no one has to ask what a 2026 steel watch has to do with 1935 beyond the line the myth has just drawn.

Here is the discipline, and it is the reason this reading is not a debunking. The watches were real. The heirlooms are real. The courage was real. Deny any of that and you lose, because the myth has kept those truths in reserve precisely so it can retreat to them when challenged — but she really did own Tudors. She did. Barthes’s point, and ours, is not that the piece lies. It is that the piece distorts: it takes things that are true and inflects them, naturalises a decision into an essence, and counts on your not asking who decided. The critic’s job is not to catch the lie. It is to name the naturalisation — to restore the human agent the passive voice deleted, and to mark the exact year the essence was invented.

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Eberhard & Co.’s latest acquisition is a useful case. The watch is a Contograf reference 31504 from 1969, a 43 mm stainless-steel, manually wound chronograph powered by calibre Eb 310-82. It carries two counters, a date at six, a reverse-panda dial and tachymeter and telemeter scales screen-printed on the inner surface of the plexiglass. Its chronograph minute register at three includes an extended scale from 30 to 45 minutes; its rounded, oval case recalls contemporary Scafograf models. Eberhard presents it as a watch poised between decades, already anticipating the more graphic sports-watch language of the 1970s.

Nothing about the object needs inflation. It is historically interesting precisely because its interest is distributed across small decisions: the square luminous indices, the date window replacing the six-o’clock marker to preserve symmetry, the scales lifted off the dial and onto the crystal, the substantial case softened by flowing lines. These are not the attributes of a monument. They are the residue of a design culture.

The museum gives that residue a grammar.

Eberhard opened its museum at the Maison de l’Aigle in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2019. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry described the inaugural display as a selection spanning the company’s production, from pocket watches and early wrist chronographs to diving watches and recent collections. More revealingly, the return to the historic Maison de l’Aigle was framed explicitly as a symbol of continuity. (FH Swiss) Continuity, in watchmaking, is rarely just chronological. It is one of the materials from which value is made.

The Contograf already demonstrates how usable that material can become. In 2014, Eberhard revived the name at Baselworld. Hodinkee noted that the new watch was called a reissue but regarded it more accurately as a reinterpretation: recognisably drawn from the mid-1960s original, yet altered by contemporary details. (Hodinkee) That distinction matters. A reissue implies recovery. A reinterpretation admits intervention. The archive supplies the evidence, but the present decides what to keep, enlarge, polish or discard.

The pattern did not stop there. In 2025 Eberhard introduced the Contodat collection, which Monochrome described as drawing from the company’s archive and referencing a 1970s model. Details such as orange accents, the geometry of the date window and the extension of the chronograph-minute scale to 45 minutes were carried forward into the contemporary watch. (Monochrome Watches) Fratello was blunter, calling the chronograph a reissue of an early-1970s Contograf. (Fratello Watches) However one chooses the terminology, the mechanism is visible: old design enters the archive, archive becomes vocabulary, vocabulary returns as product.

This does not make the museum a disguised showroom. That would be too easy, and probably wrong. Preservation has its own legitimacy. Brands can be custodians of watches, documents, prototypes and technical knowledge that might otherwise become dispersed. The museum fixes relationships between them. It gives collectors and historians something the market cannot easily provide: context.

But context is never innocent.

Place one watch beside another and genealogy begins. Select one transitional model rather than five ordinary contemporaries and experimentation starts to look like destiny. Repeat a case shape, a dial configuration or a model name decades later, and what may once have been contingent becomes a “design code.” Nothing necessarily false has occurred. The facts remain where they were. What changes is their arrangement.

This is where corporate heritage becomes interesting. The past is often presented as a reservoir of identity, as though a brand merely lowers a bucket and retrieves what has always been there. In reality, the reservoir is continually dredged. Current taste changes what looks important in an old catalogue. A once-awkward proportion can become prophetic. A forgotten colour becomes characteristic. A minor technical solution acquires symbolic weight because a contemporary watch has made it visible again.

The present teaches the past how to be remembered.

That is why the arrival of the 1969 Contograf in the Eberhard museum is more than an act of safekeeping. The watch enters an institution at a moment when its family resemblance is already commercially legible. Contograf has been revived. More recently, another historical Eberhard chronograph has supplied recognisable elements for the Contodat. (Hodinkee) The museum acquisition therefore does not begin the story. It consolidates it.

There is a quiet paradox here. A museum seems to remove objects from circulation. In a brand museum, the opposite can happen. Behind glass, an old watch may become newly productive. It can validate a contemporary collection, supply designers with forms, give marketing a lineage and make discontinuous episodes appear connected.

The danger is not fabrication but smoothness. Corporate history is messy: models fail, fashions pass, ownership changes, technologies intrude, ideas are abandoned and later rediscovered. Museums necessarily reduce that disorder. They turn survival into sequence.

The Contograf 31504 can withstand the process. Its value does not depend on pretending that 1969 knew what 2026 would need from it. It is more interesting if we allow the opposite: that the object survived without knowing what it would one day be asked to mean.

It now sits inside the Maison de l’Aigle, apparently removed from ordinary use. Yet perhaps it has rarely worked harder.

The past does not simply survive. Sometimes a brand has to acquire it first.

Sergio Galanti

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

The answer is restoration, and the word is doing considerable strategic work.

Singer’s origin makes the proposition unusually coherent. Restoration is already embedded in the brand’s founding story through Rob Dickinson’s work with significant sports cars; the Heritage Collection translates that logic to watch movements. Singer explicitly rejects reproduction and imitation: original calibres are dismantled, restored, hand-finished and installed in contemporary cases. The first Heritage chronograph of 2025 used the Valjoux 236. The V72 goes further back, and considerably further up the hierarchy of collective memory.
Then marketing performs its familiar act of disappearance. The press material speaks of soul, legends, rebirth, mechanical artistry and movements being revealed anew. Restoration becomes less a series of choices than an historical obligation finally fulfilled. The Valjoux 72 was once industrial; now we are invited to see that industriality as a temporary misunderstanding. Its bridges were apparently waiting to be frosted. Its bevels were waiting to be polished. Its architecture was waiting for a glass-box back. Singer has not merely decided to decorate and display an old calibre. The story gently suggests that the calibre has arrived at the condition it always deserved.

This is not to say the claim is fraudulent. Quite the opposite. The watch becomes interesting because the material fact survives the rhetoric. Singer says these are original, unassembled Valjoux 72 movements, and the SG7201 retains the calibre’s 18,000-vph frequency, 17 jewels and 44-hour power reserve while receiving frosted bridges, polished chamfers and satin-finished rhodium-plated components. The traditional three-register architecture remains visible on the dial: running seconds, 30-minute counter, 12-hour totaliser. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing needs to be.

In the hand, at least imaginatively until the watch is handled, the appeal is easy to locate. The steel case should feel compact rather than slight: 38.8mm across but 13.25mm high, its sunray satin surface interrupted by mirror-polished chamfers. Turn it and the rear sapphire rises into a glass box rather than ending obediently at the caseback. Light should catch first on the bevels, then fall into the old architecture below. Levers. Springs. The Y-shaped bridge. A column wheel doing its small mechanical bureaucracy. The effect is almost archaeological, except archaeology rarely comes this polished.

The steel version is the more persuasive composition. Stone grey, oyster-toned azurage, gold-coloured applied details, Singer’s habitual flash of orange. It avoids performing “vintage” too literally. The gold model is more ceremonious—black, champagne, 1N yellow gold—and consequently makes the argument louder. Singer calls the steel expression restrained and the gold one dramatic. For once, the adjectives are accurate.

Collectors will understand the temptation immediately because the V72 rearranges provenance in an unusual way. The movement carries historical significance, but not proprietary Singer history. Singer is not claiming that its ancestor built the calibre, nor that a Singer chronograph once crossed a finish line in 1965. Instead, it offers custodianship as authorship. The collector buys an authentic fragment of twentieth-century Swiss chronograph production whose first life, paradoxically, never happened.

That is a sophisticated pleasure. It is also an expensive one.

The steel Heritage V72 is CHF 23,000 before tax and limited to 50 pieces; the gold version is CHF 45,000 and limited to 20. The comparison inside Singer’s own catalogue is awkward in precisely the useful way. Last year’s Valjoux 236 Heritage launched at CHF 16,700. More pointedly, the Caballero arrived at CHF 17,500 with Singer’s first proprietary Calibre-4 Solotempo, a movement developed specifically for the brand, using four barrels to deliver a six-day power reserve. The V72 therefore asks us to accept a curious contemporary luxury equation: an old movement restored with exceptional care can cost substantially more than a new movement engineered expressly for the marque.

Perhaps that is the point.

Price in haute horlogerie has never been a clean measurement of mechanical invention. It prices scarcity, recognition, story, finishing, positioning and the anticipated pleasure of explaining the object to another informed person. Here the Valjoux name does some of the lifting. So do the 70 available movements. But scarcity is not liquidity, and historical importance does not automatically transfer from the calibre to every new watch that contains it. Singer has some auction credibility—two Track 1 examples recorded by Phillips sold above estimate—but that is hardly enough to construct a dependable secondary-market thesis. The V72 should be bought as a collector’s object, not as a disguised bond.

There is nevertheless strategic intelligence in what Singer is doing. The Heritage Collection gives the brand a second axis. One Singer develops new mechanisms and rethinks displays; the other restores canonical machinery and reframes it. Innovation on one side, conservation with ambition on the other. The danger will come if restoration becomes too easy a ladder for price escalation, because each successive “legend” then has to be more culturally charged than the last.

Eventually the attic runs out of icons.

Strip away the car analogy. Remove soul, reborn, legend. Forget the gold, the limited-edition arithmetic and the borrowed aura of Daytonas and Carreras. What remains is still unusual: an authentic Valjoux 72 made more than sixty years ago, apparently never previously assembled, finished far beyond its original industrial standard and displayed so that its architecture becomes the watch’s principal event.

That survivor is enough.

Not enough to make CHF 23,000 objectively sensible; luxury has never offered that service. Enough, however, to make the steel V72 irritatingly desirable. There is something indecently satisfying about becoming the first owner to wind a mechanism older than many of the watches that made it famous. Singer did not make the history. It found it, polished the edges, built a window around it and sent us the invoice.

One may raise an eyebrow.

The other hand is already reaching for the crown.

Sergio Galanti

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Downstream of the mainspring barrel

What it protects against originates at the source, the moment a spring is wound. Inside the barrel, a steel strip is wound ever tighter upon itself until it stores a charge of potential energy, with only one possible direction: outwards, released as the spring uncoils and the barrel rotates. For much of the history of watchmaking, this was precisely where precision went to die. A watch that gains or loses a few seconds a day is, on land, a nuisance; at sea, it was a catastrophe. Longitude could only be determined by taking the time from a known location on board and comparing it, at midday, with the position of the local sun; and since the Earth rotates by fifteen degrees per hour, a four-minute error would cause a navigator to stray by a full degree — at the equator, sixty nautical miles between where he thought he was and where he actually was. Such an instrument had to maintain the time of a distant port with an accuracy of a few seconds for weeks at sea. Everything downstream of the barrel worked against it.

From the barrel, power is transmitted from wheel to wheel along a chain of pinions to the escapement, where it is consumed in the ticking that causes the balance wheel to oscillate — a long journey for something that is so easily lost. Every pin is subject to friction; every pair of meshing teeth returns slightly less than it received; the force arrives weakened by the journey. Worse still, it does not arrive uniformly: a newly wound mainspring pushes too hard, one that is nearly spent pushes barely at all, and only one that is half-wound behaves correctly. This irregularity is not merely an aesthetic flaw. If too much force is applied to the balance wheel, it swings through a wider arc; if the force is too weak, the arc narrows; and a balance wheel whose arc varies from hour to hour does not return to its starting point at exactly the same time — in short, the watch keeps changing its mind about how long a second lasts.

Correcting the source

The earliest solutions were based on a single premise: if the source is irregular, it must be corrected. The chain and fusée, the finest of these solutions, features a tapered cone next to the barrel and connects the two elements with a chain finer than any other in a jeweller’s possession. When the mainspring is wound and the tension is high, the chain pulls from the narrow top of the cone, where a short radius dampens its force; as it unwinds, the chain moves down towards the wide base, where a longer radius provides greater grip for the weakening pull. The force emerging from the cone – dampened at one end and amplified at the other – is delivered more consistently than was the case with the force emerging from the barrel. When, in 1994, A. Lange & Söhne miniaturised a mechanism of this type in a 38.5-millimetre wristwatch (“Pour le Mérite” Tourbillon), it astonished an audience that had taken it for granted that it was impossible to produce one at that size.

The Maltese cross also corrects the source, but in a distinct manner — by enclosing it rather than graduating it. Imagine a small cross-shaped wheel next to the mainspring barrel, with four rounded arms. Three have concave ends, slightly hollowed out to accommodate the pin; the fourth is convex, solid and protrudes slightly more. The pin, fixed to the barrel arbor, moves the cross by one tooth with every turn — just as a finger pushes the hand, click by click. As winding continues, it reaches the convex tooth: the opposite curvature, instead of offering a recess, stands in its way, and the pin comes to a halt against it. The barrel cannot be wound any further.

If the barrel is allowed to turn long enough in the opposite direction — as the spring unwinds — the same arm also prevents it from uncoiling completely. What is eliminated is not the irregularity itself, but its two worst moments — the initial violent turns and the final weak ones — leaving only the reliable central section in play. Both are attempts at reform: both assume that the defect lies at the source and can be rectified before the energy is set in motion; neither calls into question the premise that the energy released by the barrel, once corrected, must still complete the entire long journey to the balance wheel.

Isolation, not correction

The remontoir operates on the opposite principle: it does not correct the path of the energy, but refuses outright to allow it to reach the balance wheel. Near the end of the wheel train, as close to the balance wheel as the watchmaker dares, a second, tiny, independent spring is fitted. At regular intervals — once a second, once every eight seconds, once every four minutes, depending on the watchmaker — the energy from the mainspring is briefly channelled to this small spring to recharge it. The moment this happens, the connection is severed: the mainspring is bypassed and, for the remainder of the interval, it is the secondary spring, and that alone, which powers the balance wheel. The two never perform the same task simultaneously: the mainspring recharges the secondary spring with short, regular pulses; whilst the secondary spring rotates the balance wheel, moment by moment. The remontoir is, in effect, a battery situated at the far end of the movement, recharged in small increments and designed to deliver the same clean impulse every time. Whatever happens upstream — friction, wear, winding that is too tight or too slow — is kept at bay.

Four interpretations

Every remontoir operates within the same narrow scope: the final stage before the balance wheel. Observe four of them and you will see four interpretations answering a single question. The first to translate this idea into a production wristwatch did so in 1999. François-Paul Journe reasoned that a tourbillon, being heavier than a standard balance wheel, would be even more sensitive to fluctuations in energy from the mainspring barrel. In his Tourbillon Souverain, the remontoir halts the gear train once per second, disconnects the tourbillon from the mainspring and allows the small spring to drive the cage on its own; in a subsequent development (2003), Journe linked the seconds hand to it, so that it advances in one-second increments. Looking at the dial, the hand does not glide: it remains still for most of a second, then jumps to the next mark, more like a metronome than a blurred line — not so much to indicate the seconds as to give substance to the underlying mechanism that keeps them precise.

Andreas Strehler, who describes himself as an engineer for luxury brands and a watchmaker for a select few, arrived at his own version in 2013, drawing inspiration from a striking watch from the 1960s, in which a satellite wheel stabilised the oscillation of the striking mechanism. Adapting this solution to a wristwatch required miniaturisation, and Strehler knew just how far he could push the limits: a spring reduced to its smallest dimensions becomes fragile. So, rather than shrinking everything down, he positioned a compact assembly directly above the seconds wheel. At the centre is a star-shaped wheel: each of its points is held in place, one at a time, by a ruby mounted on a lever integral with the seconds wheel. As long as the ruby holds a point, the star remains locked — and it is the only component to receive the impulse from the barrel. But the seconds wheel turns ceaselessly and, carrying the ruby with it, gradually moves it away from the point until it releases it. The star then springs forward one step and, in doing so, winds up its own small spring — the one which, drawing energy from the mainspring barrel, drives the seconds — until the next point encounters the ruby again and comes to a halt. Locking, releasing, winding up: a mechanical breath, one for every second.

Arnold & Son adopts Strehler’s mechanism almost to the letter in the 2015 Constant Force Tourbillon, with just two differences: the ruby that holds the star in place becomes a locking pin, and the star wheel no longer drives the seconds alone, but is coupled to a tourbillon. A support is positioned straddling the seconds wheel and, at its centre, a star-shaped wheel is held in place by a locking pin: for most of each second, that pin simply locks onto a tooth of the star, just as the arm of a turnstile holds a single person at the entrance. Once every second, the pin advances just enough to release that tooth; the support snaps forward, propelled by the barrel, rewinds the remontoir spring, until the next tooth reaches the pin and is in turn locked in place. The seconds hand jumps on the left-hand side of the dial whilst a tourbillon rotates ceaselessly on the right — discrete, protected moments set against continuous motion.

Greubel Forsey employs the differential twice, each time for a different purpose. In the 2016 Double Balancier à Différentiel Constant, it pairs two balance wheels inclined at 30°, each beating independently; due to their inclination, they are always in complementary positions, and a differential averages their rates, dampening positional error — the very same error that the tourbillon corrects by rotating a single oscillator, and which is addressed here with two balance wheels instead of one. Constant force is provided by two tiny spiral springs mounted on the differential: rewound by the mainspring every four minutes, they supply the balance wheels with a constant impulse even as the barrels run down over the seventy-two-hour power reserve. The entire assembly rises above the movement in a tower visible from the dial side, and at the top of it a disc rotates to mark each infrequent rewind — so slow that observing it rewards patience rather than attention: an instrument built to read another instrument.

The second mechanism addresses a different problem. Even when reset every second, a remontoir does not deliver a perfectly uniform impulse to the balance wheel: a balance wheel operating at 21,600 vibrations per hour receives six impulses within that second and, as the spring unwinds progressively, those six impulses are not equal — the first is stronger than the last. In the 2018 Différentiel d’Égalité, Stephen Forsey employed a differential to smooth out that residual variation: not, as in the Double Balancier, to average the outputs of two balance wheels, but to equalise the force of a single one, delivering a continuous flow to the escapement rather than a succession of jerks. Whereas the first differential averages two oscillators and dampens the deviation between their positions, this one evens out a single force and mitigates the error in its intensity.

A question of lineage

Every mechanism to date, however ingenious, is constructed from the same two elements: a spring and the wheels that wind and release it. The purest solutions dispense with the wheels — and with them the very idea of a spring that needs rewinding: the constant impulse is no longer drawn from a reserve, but arises from the very action of the elastic element that produces it. The insight came from a Rolex watchmaker, Nicolas Déhon; what made it feasible was silicon, which can be shaped into forms impossible for steel — a thin strip that flexes and snaps between two positions with the same force at every beat. Girard-Perregaux has made this the heart of its Constant Escapement. In terms of constant force alone, silicon clearly outperforms spring-driven remontoirs; yet it inspires less devotion, for a reason that has nothing to do with performance but with lineage. A spring wound and released by wheels belongs to the most ancient art — brass, steel, the patience of the hand — whilst silicon achieves the same end by a means that tradition does not fully recognise as its own.

Which brings us back to the wrist and the small jumping hand from which we began: a watch, like most of those that still feature a remontoir, constructed according to the ancient discipline of springs and wheels. It seems the most ordinary thing on the dial. But now you know what lies behind it: a spring near the balance wheel, wound in small increments, which holds in reserve a single precise impulse against whatever the barrel might hurl at it — and behind that spring, generations of watchmakers who could not accept that the final moment of such a long and loss-ridden journey should be left to chance. The hand gives a little jump. Somewhere, out of sight, the little spring is released, caught, and released again. The second it marks is exact, and it is exact by design.

About the Author

Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

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