Watchmakers love a good arms race. The primary and maybe most enduring being the race to equip a timepiece with the utmost variety of capabilities, or issues—a distinction at the moment held by Vacheron Constantin’s breakthrough Reference 57260, launched in 2015, which has 57 of them. Then, in fact, there’s the matter of depth. Amongst diving watches, Omega trumps all with its 6,000-meter Seamaster Planet Ocean Extremely Deep, as lined on this column earlier this yr.
Piaget’s Altiplano Final Idea.
Now consideration has shifted to thinness. The title of world’s thinnest mechanical watch has been held by Piaget’s Altiplano Final Idea: All the watch is simply 2-mm thick, achieved with a mix of latest strategies and micron-level-precision element manufacturing, most notably getting rid of a baseplate and constructing the motion straight on the caseback.
However tiny measurements can create large issues. Introduced in 2018, the Altiplano solely went into manufacturing in 2020 (with not more than 10 items being made a yr) and required excessive feats of engineering, together with changes to permit for minute distortions created by the strain in an plane cabin in order that the crystal wouldn’t come into contact with the fingers and interrupt the functioning of the motion.
Then in late March of this yr, Bulgari’s 1.8-mm Octo Finissimo Extremely nabbed the world’s thinnest title. It, too, saved area with the caseback doubling as a baseplate whereas, apparently, displaying hours, minutes, and seconds on separate dials—the logic being that extra wheels made for fewer overlaps, ergo much less top. For winding and setting, as a substitute of a crown there are two toothed wheels mounted on the caseback. It’s completely in line with the aesthetic of the Octo Finissimo, one of many few genuinely iconic watch designs of the 21st century. With this document, the Italian jeweler added to its status in excessive watchmaking.
Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo Extremely.
Bulgari’s stint on the prime resulted in about three months. In July, Richard Mille and Ferrari joined forces to unveil an excellent thinner watch. The RM UP-01 is simply 1.75 mm, appears to be like like a bank card, and is a tremendous feat. However statistics alone don’t inform the complete story of the RM UP-01.
Richard Mille’s RM UP-01.
It’s a conceptually radical watch. The elements are unstacked and organized in a planar vogue throughout a big floor space, and the fingers, usually discrete elements, are utilized straight onto the wheels. Extremely, and in contrast to Piaget’s and Bulgari’s skinny creations, Richard Mille respects the normal idea of a motion with a baseplate housed inside a case. Given the Ferrari partnership—“most visibly expressed within the alternative of supplies and execution of the watch,” in line with the model—it’s useful to think about the RM UP-01 as akin to an Method 1 automotive. Simply as these autos bear solely a partial resemblance to an ordinary highway automotive, the RM UP-01 appears to be like uncommon for a watch. The design is a departure from the acquainted high-tech tonneau with which the model is related, however there are some acquainted Mille touches, just like the spline screws studding the bezel.
The RM UP-01 is excessive watchmaking at its most daring, difficult the accepted notion of what a watch appears to be like like and pushing the expertise and ingenuity required to create it. However record-breaking doesn’t come low cost. At nearly $1.9 million, you’re paying simply over a thousand {dollars} per micron.
A model of this tory initially appeared within the October 2022 situation of GQ with the title “Survival of the Slimmest”.
