Patek Philippe

Grand Complications

Ladies First Minute Repeater

Watches with minute repeaters have always ranked among the rarest, most precious, and most elaborate timepieces. In an extremely compact space, their intricate inner life brings together hundreds of individual parts that interact and function in harmony, or move next to each other with minimal clearances, without making contact. The objective of the effort is to strike the time displayed on the dial with the best possible acoustic sonority. And so, at 3:34 for instance, the time is indicated with a dong- dong-dong for the hours on a low-pitched gong, a ding-dong, ding-dong on both gongs for the quarter-hours, and a ding-ding-ding-ding for the minutes on the high-pitched gong. Technical finesse that makes time so seductively audible is bound to attract the attention of women as well. Patek Philippe decided to introduce the first minute repeater in its collection of ladies' wristwatches: the Ref. 7000.
 
Ordinarily, minute repeaters belong to the category of large wristwatches. But here, Patek Philippe made an exception because its self-winding caliber R 27 PS is one of the thinnest movements with a striking mechanism. It not only ranks among the few repeater movements that are self-winding but thanks to the off-center minirotor in 22K gold – fully recessed in the plate – its height is a scant 5.05 mm. These are ideal assets for a watch intended to elegantly grace a feminine wrist, despite the formidable horological degrees of difficulty that it incorporates.