Vacheron Constantin Inside the Archives Ep. 1: The unexpected side of the world’s oldest watchmaker

Andrew McUtchen

There is a version of Vacheron Constantin that everyone knows. The Trinity. Les Métiers d’Art. The sobriety of centuries. The brand that has never — not once, not for a single year since 1755 — stopped making watches. It is, in the most profound sense, the definition of classical watchmaking. And then there is this.

A 1929 purse watch with coral pushers and a movement thinner than a fingernail. A 1929 pocket watch with a dial so architecturally strange — an elliptical sub-dial floating in a round case, day and date windows banished to opposite ends — that it shouldn’t work, and yet it absolutely does.

 

A 1931 pocket watch housing a tiny fakir — a magician — whose arms fly into the air on demand to point at the time. A 1949 wristwatch so brazenly mid-century futurist that it looks like something the watch industry will spend 2026 trying to emulate. And a 1971 tribute to Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, with a dial so graphically exuberant — so almost-Soviet in its space-age drama — that it makes you genuinely question whether you’re holding a Vacheron at all. Welcome to the unexpected.

Sitting with Christian Selmoni — Vacheron’s Style & Heritage Director, 36 years at the brand and still finding surprises in the archive — and Justin Hast, you come to understand that the unexpected isn’t a footnote to the Vacheron story. It is the story, or at least the best part of it.

As Selmoni explains, picking up the coral-pushed purse watch: “It’s so sophisticated, so unexpected — and so truly unexpected.” Watching him flip it, transforming the object from a decorative curiosity into a perfectly balanced table timepiece in a single gesture, you understand what he means. The mechanics are insane.

The movement — hand-wound, barely 1.5mm thick — is a reminder that Vacheron was doing things in 1929 that the industry still marvels at. The coral. The enamel. The double signature: Vacheron Constantin at 12, and co-signed by Biarritz. The idea that a woman in the Roaring Twenties might have this in her purse, at a time when it was still frowned upon for women to wear watches, makes the object something more than a mere horological object. It’s a social document.

The 1931 Bras en L’air piece — the magician — is something else entirely. Press the trigger and the figure’s arms shoot skyward, each one pointing to the hours and minutes respectively, before snapping back down the instant you release. It is, technically, a double retrograde. But calling it that feels like describing the Mona Lisa as oil on wood. The all-or-nothing mechanism means the hands live in a state of permanent rest until called upon, time on demand, time as theatre. Christian tells us that the Métiers d’Art Tribute To The Quest Of Time — the extraordinary clock-and-watch pairing unveiled last year in Paris — draws its DNA directly from this 1931 piece. Hold that thought and then hold the watch. The penny drops hard.

And then 1949. This is the one that stops you cold. A dial that looks like it was designed last season: oversized luminous indices, a conical center that rises toward you, a total disregard for the visual language of the era. Christian frames it as “devastated optimism” — the post-war world dreaming of flying cars and glass-domed cities, expressing that hunger for the future in a watch that had absolutely no business looking the way it did. I hold it and immediately think of the Furlan Marri Disco Volante pieces we’ve been stocking at the Discovery Studios. Vacheron got there 75 years before the trend. Of course they did.

Then, because every episode of Vacheron Constantin: Inside the Archives will land in the present, we arrive at the new Overseas Cardinal Points collection — four titanium executions in North, South, East and West, no chronograph, GMT/dual-time display, 150m water resistance, the full kit. The watch that finally, emphatically, answers the question of where the adventure story goes from here. The Cory Richards Everest moment of 2019 lit a fire that has never gone out. This is where it arrives: a full collection, properly built for purpose, properly unexpected in its colour palette — an olive-brown “autumn leaf” green, a mushroom-violet South dial, an eggshell white, and a blue that defies the renders entirely — and properly, recognisably Vacheron. My vote is the green. It’s not the green you think it is. It’s better.

That’s the thing about Vacheron. It’s never quite what you think it is. After 270 years, somehow, it’s still capable of surprise. That’s not a marketing line. That’s just what happens when you go into the archive and actually look.

Vacheron Constantin: Inside the Archives is produced by Time+Tide in partnership with Vacheron Constantin.