It’s still 2020, unfortunately. The better part of the year has had us focused mainly on keeping our collective heads above water and tentatively feeling our way through the ‘new normal’, a wretched cliché that describes a reality none of us wanted nor asked for.
Beauty for beauty’s sake seems almost superfluous to requirements, but the ability to create and appreciate beautiful objects is one of humanity’s most precious gifts. Let’s not be entirely done with it yet.
To that end, we have taken a moment out from the day-to-day to stop and breathe a reverential sigh for Breguet and its new double tourbillon masterpiece, a time-telling device so lavished with artistic attention, so expressive of the maison’s stratospheric technical capabilities, and so exaltingly, gloriously superfluous to any conceivable need that it simply makes our spirits soar.
This unapologetically perfect universe in miniature, a fiendishly accurate and precise machine, is everything that our world is not, in 2020, and we are richer for it.
Breguet is a time-telling device so lavished with artistic attention
The complex movement, entirely exposed, is powered by two independent of each other tourbillons and pivots around its own axis once every 12 hours.
Some of its components have been made in gold, a rare tradition in today’s world of watchmaking where the softer precious metal is often replaced with materials that are far less challenging to work with.
Breguet’s original overcoil invention is revisited here courtesy of the two steel balance springs that have been shaped by hand. The two mechanical hearts beat independently from each other, each driven by their own barrel.
It is one of the most complex systems ever developed by Breguet, and the aesthetic virtuosity that has been lavished upon every surface of this watch only serves to underscore what humanity is capable of in its more glorious moments.
Perhaps it admiring it, we can remind ourselves that the human spirit craves and needs beauty and to be reminded of the existence of perfection, superlative achievement and the heights to which humanity can soar. At the very, very least, it’s an absolutely magnificent watch.Â