A watch is often said to reflect its wearer’s personality. What’s true for the wearer is also true for the head of the brand – the one who gets the project over the finish line, from the initial sketches to the prototype, and every stage in between.
It’s a role that’s often, and perhaps too hastily, likened to that of an orchestra conductor, who is in charge of coordination and harmonisation more than actual creation. But this is not the case for Laurent Lecamp, Montblanc's Managing Director for watches, who is deeply involved in the conception of every dial, every hand, every case.
The times it's personal
So it was that, when we arrived at Watches and Wonders Geneva on March 31, 2022, it wasn’t just to see the new watches from Montblanc. We were also there to meet Laurent Lecamp, the man who knows the ins and outs of the products as well as the stories, large and small, behind them. Since his appointment on January 1, 2021, he’d had a little over a year to imprint his mark on the 2022 releases – and those to come. He knew he would be under scrutiny, but he had the mettle for it.
Because Laurent Lecamp is a man in love with mountains – the kind of man who has no difficulty covering extraordinary, three-figure distances at temperatures the human body clearly wasn’t designed for. Before Montblanc, there was Mont Blanc whose icy expanses he has trekked and climbed with steely determination.
Possibly the essence of the Iced Sea collection came to Laurent Lecamp during those hours alone amidst an ocean of ice. An idea so obvious that, as is often the case, no-one had thought of it before. And while we’re kicking at open doors, is it not true that a simple idea is the hardest to bring to fruition, as the Iced Sea reminds us.
Icy depths
Once you have it in your hand, its existence is self-evident. If the dial is the face of the watch, this one has nothing to hide. For once, it doesn’t take an expert’s view, a painstaking deconstruction of each wheel in the movement, to grasp its force as well as its singularity. It’s there, right before our eyes, in the form of a dial that reproduces frozen shards of ice.
It’s an arresting image. We see a glacier as static when we know it is in constant movement. Inert when it is truly alive. Monochrome when in reality it contains thousands of nuances.
This substance is captured by the Iced Sea. The dial may be perfectly flat, we lose ourselves in its depths; an illusion made possible by the skill of Montblanc’s dialmakers who orchestrate colours, shades and textures to create the shattered, fractured appearance of ice to remarkable effect.
The surface seems to rise and fall under the hands and markers, plunging to almost infinite depths beneath the sapphire crystal. So many brands seem obsessed with openworked dials and skeleton movements, going all out to create a horological village with its bridges, paths and slopes, when the Iced Sea succeeds in plunging us into icy depths… with a perfectly flat dial.
Glacial variations
Montblanc has developed three colours for the Iced Sea. The first, and most obvious, is a glacial blue. The second, an energetic green, is perfectly on-trend. The third, in shades of black, hints at the invisible depths of crevasses; those dangerous beauties where light struggles to find a way through the anfractuosity of the ice.
For a select group of collectors, a 23-piece limited edition will be unveiled at Watches and Wonders Geneva 2023, created in collaboration with the Fine Watch Club. More to come on this unique opportunity shortly.
