The gold standard
An elegant facelift for a classic Swiss collection
Blancpain is sometimes referred to as “the world’s oldest-surviving watch company”. That’s technically correct, given it was making watches in 1735. But it’s a technicality that gets around the fact that, like many renowned Swiss watchmakers, the original Blancpain fell on hard times in the mid-20th century. The last member of the Blancpain family died in 1932, and its new owners closed it down. (For the longest continuously running watchmaker, we refer you to Vacheron Constantin: founded 1755; still powering along.) Blancpain was resurrected in the Eighties by the thenOmega executive Jean-Claude Biver and his friend Jacques Piguet. The pair set about buying an old farmhouse in Le Brassus and making good on their promise to produce “six masterpieces of watchmaking”, each with a different complication: an ultra-slim movement, a tourbillon, a moon-phase indicator, and so on. These watches were objects of beauty as well as accuracy, defined by their simple, round double-stepped cases and their self-winding mechanical movements. In keeping with tradition, each Blancpain watch was once again made by a single watchmaker. Today, only about 20,000 are released each year. The brand’s most classical collection is its Villeret dress watches, named in homage to the village where Jehan-Jacques Blancpain was born. The latest addition to that family is the Villeret Ultraplate, which slims down the previous model’s case and comes in a smaller size (38mm). Available in steel or red gold, the dial is distinguished by 28 hand-positioned gold appliqués that form the Roman numerals. Also the addition of a new date window. That’s a small but significant change, and one you imagine arose from no small amount of deliberation. After all, these are masterpieces almost three centuries in the making – give or take a few years.
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