Luxury watchmakers are back with a whole array of slim mechanical watches. The machines on the wrist had been growing thicker and heavier over the years, with some of them tipping the scales at 150g or more. And they were chunky too, with quite a few about 20mm thick. That’s a fair bit of weight and bulk to strap onto your wrist and carry around through the day. With that kind of size, they were also too big to slip under the cuffs. So while complicated watches and the so-called statement pieces were all very good, they came with their own, well, bulk and heft.
Naturally, therefore, there were all the conditions for a counter-trend to emerge. To be fair, there have always been watchmakers and watch lines in the sub-40mm sweet spot that have gone through model iterations and remained favourites for years. And, of course, there are the slim and light quartz watches. But what’s gathering momentum now in the luxury timepiece space isn’t either of these. Some watchmakers like Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Audemars Piguet and so on, are taking the slimming of mechanical watches to a whole different level and their products are vying to be the size-zero icons, so to speak, of the watch world.
But then, it’s never that simple. This whole thing of slimline watches isn’t staying confined to the time-only pieces. It is catching and sweeping up the more difficult-to-make, complicated watches into its vortex as well. So you now have thin watches with perpetual calendars (where you don’t need to set the date ever as long as the watch keeps running) or with minute repeaters (ones that chime out the time at the press of a button) and so on.
The trend has picked up quite phenomenally over the last half-a-decade or so. Back in 2013, Swiss watchmaker Jaeger LeCoultre brought out its Master Ultra-Thin Jubilee to commemorate the company’s 150th year of watchmaking. With a thickness of 4.05mm, this hand-wound, time-only piece was then the thinnest mechanical watch in the world. Five years later, in 2018, the recently unveiled Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, which looks production-ready but is yet to go into the market, has halved that thickness and slips smoothly under the cuff at a never-before 2mm thick!
Vacheron Constantin Overseas Ultra-Thin Perpetual Calendar
Unless one looks at the Overseas Ultra-Thin at a bit of an angle, one tends to miss how thin it is. For upfront, with the amount of readouts there are on the dial and the subdials, one tends to expect a lot of machinery. And there is. Except it has all been put in a miniaturised package. And this is a self-winding or automatic with a conventional rotor on the movement. Still, this 41mm watch comes in at a thickness of 8.1mm. The pink gold version is the latest and trendiest.
Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P
Piaget has been jousting with Bulgari at the thinnest watch stakes. And with the 910P has taken the crown of the world’s thinnest self-winding watch. At 4.3mm, it is under a millimetre thicker than its hand-wound cousin, the 900P, which was launched a few years back and on which it is based. In fact, the visual cues are clearly there. This one uses a 30-jewel, time-only movement watch with a dial that’s slightly recessed below the level of the surrounding movement so that the hands don’t touch the crystal if the watch flexes!
Panerai Luminor Due 3 Days Automatic
A sub-40mm Panerai is news. The company known for its big timepieces has put some models on a diet and the Luminor Due 3 Days Automatic is the result of that. The 38mm stainless steel model has the more versatile looks. This watch is Panerai’s slimmest with a smaller winding rotor inset into the movement rather than placed on it.
Audemars Piguet Royal Oak RD#2 Perpetual Calendar
Audemars Piguet isn’t famous for thin watches. But that hasn’t stopped it from gunning for the record of making an ultra-thin perpetual calendar, no less. This is a complex mechanism that’s typically thick as it also has to physically account for leap years. So what is usually a three-level movement has been collapsed into one. At only 6.3mm thick, it is a watchmaking record and even knocks 2mm off the Royal Oak Extra Thin Jumbo.
Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept Watch
This is the most extreme mechanical watch in terms of miniaturisation that’s ever been made! While manufacturers find it tough to create 2mm-thick movements, here we have a whole watch that limbos under that limit. To break the limitations of size imposed by conventional watchmaking, this one blurs the differences between case and movement. The case itself is the baseplate on which the mechanicals of the watch are set. The dial is beside the mechanicals rather than on them. The crown is actually flat, so that it can be held and turned because a 2mm round bit might be difficult to use.
Drive de Cartier Stainless Steel Extra-Flat
The Drive de Cartier looks like a curious mix of pre-World War II cushion-shaped case with some slim 1960s and 1970s proportions. In fact, it’s slightly asymmetrical with the length at 38mm and width at 39mm. This hand-wound stainless steel watch runs on Cartier’s calibre 430 MC and has a sunburst dial, prominent Roman numeral indexes and blued steel sword hands, is the epitome of understated chic. In fact, it has more visual heft than physical. At 6.6mm thick, it is the thinnest watch in Cartier’s line.
