This season Vacheron Constantin, the 250-year-old Genevan watch house that’s been making watches continously since its founding, presents another intriguing Métiers d’Art collection. Every year the home produces a number of limited-edition watches that showcase a unique craft or skill, frequently one that’s at risk of vanishing or just being forgotten. By highlighting these rare abilities and methods, Vacheron Constantin helps to preserve crafts and arts which are at risk of extinction. Previously we view Japanese Maki-e lacquer, guilloché engraving and complicated engraving and enamelwork.
This season flowers blossom around the dials from the Florilège trio of watches, produced only for women. Inspired through the 18th-century British botanical sketches in the famous ‘Temple of Flora’ book, released by Robert Thornton in 1799, timepieces are just as much pieces of art because they are timekeepers. Each one of the three variants is decorated by well-known enamellist Anita Porchet. Antique tools as well as machinery are restored to have the ability to make the ornately decorated dials that comprise the Métiers d’Art watches. The Florilège watches use a 50-year-old guilloché or hands-turn engraving machine to produce the fragile textures engraved to the gold base plate from the dials.
The “Full” signifies a Strelitizia – the bird of paradise flower – and it is became a member of through the “Whitened Lily” and also the “China Limodron”. A fragile pattern of guillochéd or engine-switched lines is engraved around the dial. Then thin bands of gold are fused round the designs to produce obstacles into which enamel is used in vivid coolers and baked several occasions at 800oC, a method referred to as ‘Grand Feu’ due to our prime temps where the enamel is frequently fired. The dial is finally covered inside a thin veneer of colourless enamel. The hands-wound Calibre 4400 sits below these exquisite dials, and every one of these watches also bears the coveted Hallmark of Geneva, symbolic of quality craftsmanship and precision.
Just 20 from the three versions from the watch, set with 64 round-cut diamonds, is going to be made along with a further five special collectors’ models is going to be created featuring baguette-cut diamonds.
