Audemars Piguet - Jules Audemars Moon-Phase Calendar
The Jules Audemars Moon-Phase Calendar watch features a round pink gold case, a streamlined bezel and a dial ensuring perfectly readable astronomical indications. It displays a discreetly self-effacing air that serves to highlight its sleek, slender lines. It arouses authentic emotion of the kind surrounding objects that are built to last, doubtless because it is endowed with that special something that is in fact the natural elegance of authentic classics.
A region, a culture: a collection
The models in the Jules Audemars collection represent the very roots of Audemars Piguet. This collections tells the story of an exceptional place and some exceptional people. The place is the Vallee de Joux, and the people are those who have nurtured Fine Watchmaking in this remote region.
Well before the timepieces from this valley were exported to the four corners of the world, everything was already in place. From the mid-18th century onwards, alongside the farming work they undertook during the summer, the local population devoted many hours to building watch movements. They spent their long harsh winters at the workbench in order to fulfil orders from Geneva-based companies. They later began making their own movements and entire watches. The boldest of them founded manufactories, or Manufactures as they became known.
The men of the Vallee had thus acquired the ability to conduct the entire process, from design through to production, using hand-craftsmanship techniques. This dexterity, this manual know-how was handed down from generation to generation. Today it is accompanied by technological progress and semi-industrial-scale production, and yet the watches nonetheless embody deeply rooted origins and culture.
Jules Audemars and Edward Piguet became officially associated in 1875 and created the Manufacture Audemars Piguet. Both were watchmakers and accomplished masters of their chosen profession that they cherished and constantly perfected. Building on their knowledge, they played a pioneering role and took up the challenge of making entire watches under one roof. The company they established has been active ever since and has remained in the hands of the founding families.
The Jules Audemars collection pays tribute to this firm by bearing the name of one of the founders. It recounts this legacy and is imbued with a profound awareness of its heritage yet without any sense of nostalgia. It reinterprets the past with a contemporary vision. Its quest is focused on simplicity and a refusal of anything superfluous or purely ornamental. It is this unaffected simplicity that makes it both naturally elegant and unmistakably modern.
The watchmaking spirit
The round case is an archetype that tends to make one forget that the circle is the perfect shape par excellence. In opting for an extremely slim bezel, the Jules Audemars Moon-Phase Calendar watch reveals the full measure of this pure form. The pink gold case seems light and almost ethereal, while the slender bezel ensures maximum dial opening and thus enhances readability.
The refined execution of the silver-toned dial features a delicate satin-brushed finish, while the date and moon-phase displays are surrounded by a decorative fillet highlighting their snailed inner decoration. Within this elegant ensemble, the baton-shaped hour-markers assert their understated, perfectly balanced air of distinction.
The date, day and moon phase are some of the most useful watch functions in daily life, which is why they appeared on portable timepieces at a very early stage, even before the minute hand. They remind us of the origins of horology, of the utility and the beauty of astronomical indications. The moon phase continues to exercise its unfailingly poetic charm.
In this model, beauty also lies beneath the dial, in the meticulous work performed by the watchmaker in patiently assembling and decorating this movement representing an ingenious mechanical reproduction of our calendar. All the bridges are bevelled, polished and adorned with Côtes de Geneve, and the mainplate is circular-grained. This wealth of details is visible only when the case is open, and otherwise remains concealed within. And it is precisely such tiny, hidden details that embody the true spirit of fine watchmaking.
[Rating: 5 / 5 stars]
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