A Magnificent Philippe Dufour Simplicity 34MM

Writing about Philippe Dufour presents some philosophical problems. In a world where watchmakers historically became famous for their mastery of complicated watchmaking, Dufour’s career trajectory went in almost exactly the opposite direction. He started out making extremely complicated watches – chiming complications, and specifically, grande et petite sonneries, which are the most difficult of all classic high complications – and then, the Duality watches, which have two balances with their rates averaged by a tiny differential. This is an interesting complication and a rare one (even rarer when Dufour began making them, in a very small series starting in the late 1990s) and if you were catching up on Dufour’s body of work for the first time and got as far as his first grande sonnerie pocket watches and the Duality, you might expect him to pursue the course followed by so many of his contemporaries in independent watchmaking: More complications, more reiterations of prior complications, and then perhaps in the fullness of time, a time-only watch, but with at least one or two technical idiosyncrasies (an extra long power reserve, perhaps, or some sort of exotic new version of an intricate legacy escapement) as a kind of palate cleanser.

You would therefore be surprised, maybe even shocked, to discover that the vast majority of Dufour’s watches are not only not complicated, but indeed, willfully simple. As a matter of fact, they are about as simple as a watch can get, at least from a mechanical perspective. They are time-only watches without even so much as a center seconds display (making a watch with a center seconds hand is enough of a departure from horological business as usual that for much of the history of watchmaking, such a display was considered a complication in its own right) and with a gear train arrangement that would have been easily understood by a watchmaker from the Vallée de Joux, or for that matter anywhere else, two hundred or more years ago.

The problem therefore in writing about Dufour is that you are writing about something about which it would seem there is not much to actually say. Moreover, there is not particularly anything new to report – as a matter of fact, the whole point of the Simplicity is that it eschews the appeal of novelty and the apparent need for constant reinvention which preoccupies the rest of the industry, including most independents. You have to admit it takes a majestic disregard for the exigencies of the market to spend much of your professional life simply doing the same thing over and over and over, with little if any variation. Okay, we are conditioned to expect this in some quarters – the Japanese word “shokunin,” which means someone who does indeed do just one thing over and over again, and for whom excellence is not even an overt end, but rather an outcome the pursuit of which can detract from its actual achievement, expresses a key aspect of Japanese craftsmanship.

But think about it for a minute. Since the first Simplicity came out, in 2000, Dufour has simply gone on making them, in his slow-and-steady-wins-the-race fashion, year after year. In the meantime, every year we see brands struggling to outdo themselves and each other in producing something new, which has had its own benefits – some of the contests to break records in ultra-thin watchmaking have certainly led to fascinating new watches. I think of Bulgari’s multi-year run at breaking and making records for ultra-thin watchmaking across a whole range of complications; of Greubel Forsey’s string of innovations and inventions in tourbillons, and of all the innovations in chronograph design that have taken place (in no particular order). But in contrast to the breathless and constant drumbeat of New New New, Dufour has gone on quietly pursuing his own particular brand of excellence and in doing so, has inspired a whole new generation of younger independent watchmakers, who find the simple watch an apt canvas on which to display their own philosophies and talents.

If there is one individual responsible for the current wave of fascination with fine hand finishing as the single most important indicator of qualitative superiority in watchmaking, it’s Philippe Dufour. For this edition of AWAW, we have what is in many respects, the quintessential Simplicity, in pink gold, in the original 34mm diameter that Dufour chose at the outset as the most suitable size for this most classically oriented watch. The fact that Dufour’s mastery of hand finishing is at least the equal of anyone else’s in the entire history of fine watchmaking is well known but nothing quite prepares you for the experience of seeing one and handling one for the first time (I’ve seen several, lucky me, over the years).

First of all the impression the watch makes in terms of visual impact is, I think, essentially impossible to convey in photographs. One look at the movement and you’ll understand why Dufour enjoys the reputation he enjoys. It’s well known that he has had good things to say about watchmaking from several different manufacturers and that he’s gone out of his way to praise some of the work from both A. Lange & Söhne and Grand Seiko (he gave the Seiko Micro Artist Studio pointers on hand finishing and there is a picture of him in the MAS workshop at Seiko Epson in Suwa) and on another level, he is on the record as having a lot of respect for NOMOS Glashütte – and the man wears a Rolex Pepsi GMT Master II on the regular as well.

But the movement of a Simplicity manages to make just about anything and everything else look a little shabby. (This is not to say that there are not other watchmakers doing exceptional work, and at a certain level comparisons become pointless because you are no longer comparing objective skill levels, but rather, expressing your own personal tastes; Roger Smith, for example, gives up nothing in excellence to anyone but he equally obviously is not working in the Swiss-French movement design and decoration idiom either). This particular watch, if you’ll excuse me for being a little corny, is talismanic; it is so much a reflection of the skill and accumulated decades of experience that went into it, that it feels like a very tangible physicalization of those skills – in a very real sense, the watchmaker is embodied in the watch.

The quality of the watch does not just show in its appearance – it shows in the experience of handling, wearing, and winding it as well. The click spring, for instance, which ratchets against the teeth of the mainspring barrel’s ratchet wheel, is so beautifully formed that like the rest of the watch, it transcends its own functionality to become an object of immense formal beauty. But it also sounds and feels incredible, making winding the watch an intense visceral and sensual pleasure. You can make a perfectly serviceable click spring out of a bent wire and it’ll work just fine (that’s how the Valjoux/ETA 7750’s click spring is made) but if there ever were a demonstration of the fundamental truth that it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, it’s a Dufour Simplicity.

A few years ago, when I was still with HODINKEE, we caught up with Philippe Dufour at his workshop, on the tail end of a long shoot. Dufour and I had a long talk (which you can listen to right here if you’re inclined) and I remember a lot of what he said. Of course, we got onto the subject of hand finishing. He was blunt and rather brutal about what he felt was the gradual and across the board abandonment of fine hand finishing by legacy brands whom he obviously felt were both letting down their customers and letting down the side – the side being generations of watchmakers whose accumulated centuries of skill and experience were being disrespected and cheapened by the increasing, and to him glaringly obvious, tendency of luxury watch brands to produce simulations of fine watchmaking instead of the real thing. “They make a watch with finishing so poor you can see it from twenty centimeters away,” he said,  “And then they give their customers loupes as gifts! They give them a stick with which to beat them!”

There are a lot of different places to find value in watchmaking as Dufour himself has acknowledged. A great watch, to be a great watch, does not have to represent the last word in the expression of a certain highly specific idiom of movement design and finishing. However, a Dufour Simplicity is more than that. It has had poured into it the spiritual commitment to the creation of a certain kind of beauty in an unhurried, zero-hyperbole fashion which has become extremely rare in any kind of modern fine watchmaking, where even the best seem often unable to resist adding that one extra element that begins to detract.

The Simplicity has become the legend it has become, and Dufour has become the legend that he has become, through the apparently simple but actually, incredibly difficult expedient of dispensing with pretty much everything that the marketing of modern luxury watches has acclimated us to thinking is indispensable. We have all more or less acquiesced, without realizing we’ve done it, to mass luxury simulations of the real thing. But at least for now, you can still, every once in a while, get a watch that reminds you of why fine watchmaking deserves the epithet in the first place.

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