A Star To Steer By: The DB28XS Starry Seas

The stars, the sea, and the passage of time are connected with each other through the arts of navigation, the urge to explore, and maybe more than anything else, the purely emotional experience of seeing, on a dark night, how the sky and the sea seem to become one single entity, on which one might set sail not only for shores, but for worlds unknown. De Bethune’s DB28xs Starry Seas is an attempt on the part of Denis Flageollet to create a wristwatch that embodies not just an abstract, but also a concrete experiential relationship between the oceans and the music of the spheres.

The De Bethune DB28xs was originally released in 2023 and it was at the time, something of a departure from the approach that De Bethune had taken to the DB28 watches up until that point. The DB28 watches up until that point, had been as is typical for De Bethune, conceived of and created as large format demonstrations of avant garde watchmaking, with sizes usually in the 42mm to 43mm range. They were despite the size, very comfortable to wear thanks to the floating lugs, but there is no doubt that at 38.7mm, the Starry Seas is more versatile, while giving up none of the visual drama of the larger De Bethune and DB28 watches.  The DB28xs Starry Seas still has the signature De Bethune and DB28  design elements, including the floating, open lugs with their ogival tips, the crown at 12:00, and a full range of De Bethune’s technical innovations, including the delta shaped movement bridge, but the dial was a new exercise in visual poetry.

The dial is composed of two basic elements – heat-tempered blued titanium, engraved with a guilloché pattern, which represents the sea, and tiny gold pins, representing the stars. The ripples of the sea appear to be, so to speak, regularly irregular in the same way that ocean waves are; while physical waves can appear to behave unpredictably, there is always a sense that there is some deeper order to their frequency and height.

So it is with the dial of the Starry Seas. This is the watch in which De Bethune introduced its so-called “random guilloché” pattern. This pattern does indeed seem random at first, although the crests and troughs of the waves seem to have an underlying resemblance in terms of their physical dimensions. And there’s another hidden order in the dial – although the pattern does look random, if you look closely, you’ll see that the ripples are bilaterally symmetrical down the long axis of the dial.

The movement is De Bethune caliber DB2005, which is also used in the Starry Varius watches.

The use of blued titanium is carried over to the movement, which has a blued titanium insert on the center of the delta bridge, and a blued titanium balance with white gold rim weights. The basic layout of the movement is almost perfectly symmetrical but the staggered position of the mainspring barrels keeps the composition from seeming too static.

Despite the apparent emphasis on the beauty of the dial, there’s no shortage of technical refinement either. Caliber DB2005 in addition to the titanium balance, also has De Bethune’s triple pare-chute antishock system, as well as its unique balance spring, which has an affix on its terminal curve offering the same advantages as a Breguet overcoil, but without the added thickness. Although at 30mm in diameter, caliber DB2005 is the size of a conventional wristwatch movement (somewhat a matter of standard practice in the industry; 30mm was the largest allowed diameter in the wristwatch category at the observatory trials) it still has a six day power reserve.

It’s a seductive watch. Normally smaller sizes in watchmaking today tend to default to more conservative designs, on the assumption that a more traditional diameter necessarily means more conventional aesthetics. The DB28xs Starry Seas just goes to show you that a distinctive design identity and technical innovation can just as easily be showcased on a smaller canvas, and that a traditional case size can be an effective window into a world that feels infinite in its expanse.

The DB28xs Starry Seas: case, polished grade 5 titanium, 38.7mm x 7.4mm; polished grade 5 floating lugs; sapphire crystals front and back. Dial, silver plated hour and minute ring with transfer printed Arabics; blued titanium dial with world-first “random guilloché” pattern; stars in white gold; polished titanium hands. Movement, hand wound De Bethune caliber DB2005, 30mm diameter running in 27 jewels at 28,800 vph with six day power reserve;, self-regulating double mainspring barrels; balance in blued titanium with white gold rim weights; silicon escape wheel; De Bethune balance spring with patented terminal curve; triple pare-chute antishock system.

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for De Bethune; see the DB28xs Starry Seas here, as well as the DB28 collection.