Only Watch is back, the traditional charity auction organised every two years in support of the Monegasque Association against Myopathies, to accelerate scientific research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a rare genetic disorder that mainly affects male children and manifests itself in early childhood. 54 participating brands and 53 watches will be auctioned off on 6 November, in collaboration with Christie's, at the Hôtel des Bergues Four Seasons in Geneva. One of the main features of the 2021 edition of the event, the ninth in order of time, concerns the change of colour: Only Watch is abandoning its institutional blue for a bright orange, taken up in places on most of the timepieces that will go on sale, all unique pieces, made especially for the occasion. Daring to go for an entirely orange dial are Maurice Lacroix and Speake-Marin.
Patek Philippe has chosen to offer a desk clock, Ref. 27001M-001, inspired by a desk clock sold to James Ward Packard in 1923 and now preserved at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva. The watch is fitted with a new complicated calibre with perpetual calendar, moon phase, week number and power reserve indicator (of 31 days).
Girard-Perregaux instead dusted off an icon from the 1970s, the Casquette, a quartz watch with a vertical LED display, but revisited by the Bamford Watch Department.
Tudor is offering an original Black Bay GMT Master Chronometer (remember that there are already two Black Bay by Only Watch that have gone into production), featuring a new aged-effect finish on the bracelet, case and even the movement, thanks to two different techniques: one for the stainless steel of the habillage and one for the bridges and brass plate of the automatic calibre.
Audemars Piguet is auctioning a Royal Oak "Jumbo" Extra-Thin Ref. 15202, the last to be powered by the Jaeger-LeCoultre-derived calibre 2121, the thinnest automatic movement with a central rotor and date display of its time, first introduced on the Royal Oak in 1972. The watch combines a sandblasted titanium case and bracelet with the polished Bulk Metallic Glass used for the bezel.
In the FFC Blue model, based on an original idea by Francis Ford Coppola and François-Paul Journe, the protagonist is an automaton in the shape of a hand whose mobile fingers appear or disappear instantaneously to indicate the time. With a single tantalum case and a blue hand, characteristic of all Journe watches created for Only Watch, it is equipped with the calibre 1300.3, a self-winding mechanical movement in 18-carat pink gold, with a unidirectional oscillating weight in 22-carat 5N gold.
Cyrus Genève has created the Klepcys DICE Only One (where DICE stands for Double Independent Chronograph Evolution), a novel single-pusher chronograph capable of measuring two short times independently of each other or in synchrony. Not to be confused therefore with the split-seconds version where the double hand measures the time of two phenomena that have the same beginning but end at different times or indicate an intermediate time interval. At its heart is the new self-winding Manufacture CYR718 calibre, equipped with two independent chronograph movements and two display axes: one corresponds to the chrono seconds and the other to the 30-minute counter of the double chronograph.
Breguet will be bringing to auction a faithful reproduction of its famous pilot's watch, the Type XX, with a case with a small diameter of 38 mm conforming to the original, a straight crown, like that of the Type XX models for civil use, and a bronze-coloured dial that is a nod to the very rare civil and military models sold in the 1950s and 1960s.
The unique piece made by Hublot for the occasion is the Big Bang Tourbillon, a watch cut in transparent, orange sapphire that allows a glimpse of the MHUB6035 calibre, an in-house self-winding tourbillon movement with sapphire bridges.
