A Risky Idea That Refused to Fade
The Turbine’s arrival came four years after Perrelet was revived by the Spanish Festina Group, following an earlier and ultimately unsuccessful relaunch by previous owners who, despite not making a go of it, deserve credit for keeping one of watchmaking’s most important names alive.
A Legacy in Motion
As scholars of horological history will know, Abraham-Louis Perrelet founded his eponymous brand in the mid-18th century and is still credited today as the creator of the original self-winding watch. It was said that a 15-minute stroll was sufficient to charge the mainspring for eight days of uninterrupted timekeeping.
Perrelet’s grandson, Louis-Frédéric, was equally influential. He developed a series of marine watches with additional functions, including measuring instruments and even a split-seconds chronograph. His work earned him the prestigious Prix Lalande in 1970, awarded by the French Academy of Sciences for contributions to scientific progress in astronomy.
The advances made by the two Perrelets were honoured by Festina in the first watches of the new-generation Perrelet, which paid homage to Abraham-Louis’s self-winding mechanism through a model featuring twin parallel rotors, one on the dial side and the other beneath the movement. It was the former that gave rise to the “Turbine,” which, as its name suggests, was inspired by the blades of an aircraft jet engine. The cut-outs in the top-mounted disc allow glimpses of the dial beneath, creating different forms of animation depending on the model.
When the Turbine Became a Canvas
This distinctive feature has attracted collaborations with several notable artists, including Chris Alexander, better known as The Dual Artist, who created a one-off Turbine that was auctioned for charity in 2024 at Time For Art in New York.
Last year, meanwhile, the prolific seconde/seconde/ (Romain André) worked with Perrelet on a 25-piece edition featuring his typically irreverent take on the theme of “safety first,” complete with a yellow warning sign cautioning wearers to keep their fingers well clear of the Turbine’s spinning blades.
Later in the year, another artistic interpretation followed for Dubai Watch Week, produced in collaboration with celebrated Arabic calligrapher Diaa Allam, renowned for his monumental murals. He created a unique, multi-coloured artwork for the lower dial beneath the turbine blades, adding Arabic numerals around the circumference.
There’s a good chance that even those (sorry, we) sceptics who once sneered at the Turbine when it first appeared might now have to admit that, through both these limited-edition art projects and the extensive range of regular production models, what once seemed like a gimmick has proved itself to be a genuinely cool idea. And in an age when watch buyers are increasingly searching for something different, the Turbine’s appeal seems only likely to spool up even further…
