Historians of the luxury watch trade often linger on the quartz crisis of the 1970s, when the introduction of cheap, battery-powered wristwatches from Japan ravaged the Swiss mechanical industry. Although the crisis is often associated with the ’70s, the early ’80s were, in a sense, even more brutal. Nobody seemed to know what a recovery might look like.
Well, almost nobody.
Jacques Piguet, a movement manufacturer, and Jean-Claude Biver, a marketing and sales executive, were not like most Swiss. In 1981, the men purchased the venerated Swiss brand Blancpain. Founded in the village of Villeret in 1735, the company had fallen on hard times in recent decades. Piguet and Biver seized the opportunity of a fire sale — they reportedly paid about $16,000 for the brand — to make good on a vision summed up by the slogan: “Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be.”
To naysayers who believed that mechanical watches had no future, their plan was foolish. But the men were undeterred. “The vision Blancpain had was that a fine mechanical watch and a quartz watch were totally different worlds,” Jeff Kingston, a collector, watchmaking expert and independent consultant to Blancpain, tells WorldTempus. “Mechanical watches represented tradition, craft, fine finishing — they were emotional, romantic creations — what a quartz watch never could be.”
The brand doubled down on its commitment to mechanical watchmaking in 1983 with the introduction of the Complete Calendar Moon Phase, a slender 34 mm watch in gold and platinum casing. “It was a remarkable introduction by Blancpain, and a landmark piece for the whole industry in the sense that it showed that traditional watchmaking — beautifully done, romantic, emotional, those things we treasure in watches today — was important,” Kingston says.
The Moon Phase would, by decade’s end, be joined by five additional complicated wristwatches in 34 mm precious metal cases — the Ultra-Thin in 1984, the Perpetual Calendar in 1986, the Minute Repeater in 1988, the Chronograph and Split-Seconds Chronograph in 1988 and ’89, and the Flying Tourbillon, also in ’89 — making up what collectors now refer to as Blancpain’s vaunted “six masterpieces.”
“Not only are these watches a great testament to high-end watchmaking but they represent rebirth, the beginning of entrepreneurship 2.0 in our industry and a huge aesthetic statement,” the collector Andrea Casalegno (@iamcasa) tells WorldTempus.
Today, as desire for timepieces from the late 1980s and 1990s — a period dubbed “neo-vintage” — continues to grow, Blancpain’s sextet of complicated wristwatches is attracting new admirers, says Tim Green, the commercial director of Subdial, a collectible watch trading platform in London.
“Neo-vintage is beginning to be this really interesting and popular section of our portfolio,” Green says. “It really feels like collectors are looking for that pocket of interesting watches from the ’80s, ’90s to early naughties made in really small numbers with lots of creativity, passion and love for watchmaking. Blancpains are absolutely up there, particularly the masterpiece set. I’ve been hands on with all of them from the tourbillons to the split-second chronograph to the minute repeater. I’m wearing the chronograph reference 1185 blue dial at the moment. It’s a very rare watch but it’s not in your face. These are all diminutive but perfectly proportioned and really excellently executed creations.”
Part of what made the collection so memorable is that it came as something of a surprise. While Blancpain had the expertise and legacy to market complicated wristwatches, it had, since the 1953 introduction of its genre-defining dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms, become closely associated with sport watches.
“The prominence of the Fifty Fathoms made people forget what Blancpain had done and what Blancpain was,” Kingston says. “The brand has never retreated from the world of complications but it has been overshadowed by the Fifty Fathoms.”
The brand’s 1988 Minute Repeater, for one, forced watch enthusiasts to sit up and take notice. “It was the smallest minute repeater ever made,” Kingston says. “About a year later, it was followed by a perpetual calendar minute repeater in 34 mm.”
Echoes Green: “I remember A. Lange & Söhne brought out the Richard Lange in 39 mm, and talked about how hard they’d worked to get the minute repeater into a 39 mm platinum case,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘Blancpain did this 30 years ago and people forget just how good it was and still is.’”
The chronographs — a vertical clutch chronograph (ref. 1185) and its split-second sibling (ref. 1186) — were equally impressive. “The 1185 vertical clutch chronograph was supplied to Audemars Piguet, Breguet, Vacheron Constantin, Cartier, Chopard,” Kingston says. “It became the chronograph of choice for many Swiss watch houses.”
At a time when tourbillons were still a rarefied feature, Blancpain did something else revolutionary: The brand worked with the watchmaker Vincent Calabrese to create not only the first flying tourbillon in a wristwatch, but also the world’s thinnest flying tourbillon.
“The six masterpieces all in platinum sold as a set,” Kingston says. “If you wanted to get them, you’d buy a presentation box. Then, as the cherry on the cake, Blancpain in 1991 introduced the 1735 Grande Complication, which combined all of the complications of the six masterpieces in one watch. The 1735 was a perpetual calendar, split-second chronograph, flying tourbillon, minute repeater and, considering all of its complications, very, very thin.”
For neo-vintage collectors, the most appealing part may be that the six masterpieces are still circulating quietly in the secondary market, waiting to be rediscovered. “There’s a flying tourbillon in platinum for 16,000 pounds,” Green says. “Try and find another flying tourbillon in platinum that’s not Chinese made. The value is absolutely crazy.”
