The Tourbillon “Souscription,” The First New Watch From Daniel Roth Reborn
From out of the past, an all-but-forgotten master returns.
My earliest experience of interactions with other watch enthusiasts goes back pretty far. In the mid-1990s, there were precious few resources for watch lovers interested in getting in touch with other watch lovers – there were electronic bulletin board services and Usenet newsgroups, but in the last decade of the 20th century, if you wanted information, you had to look to print publications, and those were definitely the red-headed ugly stepchildren of the publishing world. Generally relegated to the bottom back of the newsstands, next to (I’m not exaggerating) the model railroading, numismatics, stamp and doll collecting magazines, the watch enthusiast publications were earnest attempts to offer high quality content to a very small group of people inexplicably obsessed with mechanical watches. What they were definitely not, was page-turners. Skip ahead to the specs of the Tourbillon Souscription.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, the whole world of watch enthusiasts was upended and transformed by the appearance of the first generation of actual enthusiast websites. Running off Web 1.0 forum software, these sites – among them, Timezone.com and ThePuristS.com (both still in existence) gave enthusiasts the chance to not only talk amongst themselves, but also surface watches, watchmakers and watchmaking which would, in the pre-internet days, have been likely to remain obscure.
My own first extensive experience of the power of the Internet to bring enthusiasts together (and to let them experience the never ending pleasure of arguing with each other) was as a moderator on ThePuristS.com and one of the heroes of independent watchmaking, then and there, was Daniel Roth.
It is not easy to convey at a distance of over two decades just how important Daniel Roth was, what his reputation was. To understand why he was so revered as a watchmaker it helps to know a little bit about his professional life.
His story is intertwined inextricably with that of Breguet. Breguet while the founder was alive was probably the brightest star in watchmaking but, after his death in 1823, his legacy had more to do with the diaspora of skilled craftsmen from his workshop than with the output of the Breguet workshop per se. His many inventions have also influenced watchmaking down to the present and will do so for the foreseeable future. The company continued to produce small numbers of finely made watches, but passed from the founder’s family into the hands of an English family named Brown, who ran the brand for over a century before selling it, in 1970, to the Chaumet brothers in Paris.
The Chaumet brothers, who came from a family of jewelers, were determined to revive Breguet and for that purpose, they hired a promising young Swiss watchmaker named Daniel Roth. Roth came from a family of watchmakers in Neuchâtel. He graduated from the watchmaking school in Nice and in 1967 came back to Switzerland where he worked in the Vallée de Joux, first for Jaeger-LeCoultre and then, for seven years, Audemars Piguet. AP at that time was still a small company, with just a few dozen employees and its stock in trade was the production of complicated and extra-thin watches. Daniel Roth joined the company in 1975.
Roth would work for Breguet for over a decade and it is not too much to say that he was almost single-handedly responsible for creating a whole new design language which took Breguet’s aesthetics and adapted them to wristwatches. He was responsible as well for overseeing the production of the first Breguet tourbillon wristwatch. This was and is the 1988 reference 3350 – a round watch with the tourbillon visible on the dial side. The tourbillon sat under a black polished steel bridge, and had a three-pronged seconds hand on the pivot of the carriage; each of the seconds hands swept in turn across a sector marked out in 20 second increments.
In those days, tourbillon wristwatches produced in series essentially did not exist; the 3350 was preceded by Audemars Piguet’s ultra-thin automatic 24643 by only two years.
The Chaumet brothers had gambled in acquiring Breguet and, eventually, their luck ran out. They went bankrupt in 1987 and Breguet was sold to Investcorp, a Saudi-based company which at one point also owned Tiffany and Vacheron Constantin. Daniel Roth started his own company, under his own name, in 1988. (I think of F. P. Journe’s remark about why he started his own brand – that he was tired of throwing pearls before swine; I have no idea if something like that went through Daniel Roth’s mind but I wouldn’t be surprised. He had devoted more than a decade to making Breguet meaningful again to contemporary collectors and I imagine he would at that point want to begin making his own name as significant as he had made someone else’s).
Daniel Roth made watches under his own name until the year 2000. Before then, however, there were storm clouds. Like many very talented watchmakers, he seems to have preferred being at the bench to looking at spreadsheets, and in the mid-1990s, his main financial backer (Siber Hegner) pulled out, leaving him in immediate need of financial support. This appeared in the form of The Hour Glass, in Singapore, who bought a majority stake in 1994. The partnership seems to have been yet another example as his work at Breguet was, of a creative mind at cross-purposes with business interests, and in 2000, THG sold Daniel Roth to Bulgari, at which point Daniel Roth himself was no longer involved with the company.
In the meantime, Daniel Roth himself would start a company under a different name – Jean Daniel Nicolas, a portmanteau of his first name, his wife’s (Nicole) and his son’s (Jean). Under the JDN name, he would produce some of the most beautiful tourbillon wristwatches anyone has ever produced – however, in extremely small numbers; just a few per year. There were a few collectors around the world who remembered who he was and how he had reshaped and reinvented not only Breguet, but modern watchmaking and independent watchmaking, who supported his work, but for much of the 2000s you could meet many collectors for whom the name was a faint echo of a glorious past rather than a force to be reckoned with in the present..
Daniel Roth was remembered and respected among a small circle of collectors, but very little in the wider world of watch enthusiasts. Many years ago, when Max Büsser brought his watches to America for the first time, we had lunch. He said a lot of things I remember, but one stuck with me, which is that he thought one of the biggest problems for both the industry and enthusiasts, was ignorance of the past (and to add my own thought, a willful disregard for the past; the industry devours its own children). Daniel Roth is a case in point.
This is all my way of saying that by the time I found out about Daniel Roth on ThePuristS.com in the very late 1990s, he had already, as a Mafioso might say, “made his bones” and then some. I wasn’t especially aware of his stature or history at the time. But despite not knowing much at that point about his past, I remember very vividly seeing his watches for the first time more than twenty years ago.
To say that they made an impression is to say nothing at all. They were of obvious, extremely high quality. If you wanted to draw a line around the period of greatest purity I guess you would want to look at the period just after Daniel Roth had founded his company and just before it was acquired by The Hour Glass. Roth founded his company 1988 and THG bought it in 1994 and if you are a purist, I guess you would want one of the watches from that six year period before THG got involved, although Roth did not leave the company that bore his name until 2000. Nonetheless there is something indisputably romantic about the earlier period when, at least as much as it is possible to be true to your own vision in an industry where reliance on others for parts and technical support is inevitable, Daniel Roth was true to his own vision.
In an extensive article on early Daniel Roth watches, Collectability.com wrote:
“Daniel Roth started his company in 1988, designing and leading the production of many of the early models released under his own name. From around 1995 onwards, the watchmaker became much less involved, as the majority of the brand’s ownership changed hands. From this point, the aesthetic and mechanical focus of the pieces produced under the Daniel Roth name shifts radically, such that collectors of early Daniel Roth tend to pay particular attention to the period between 1988 and 1995.”
The movements for the watches he made under his own name were supplied by Lemania but extensively modified and the first watch to carry the Daniel Roth name was, unsurprisingly given his history with Breguet, a tourbillon.
The C187 is still one of the most instantly recognizable watches Daniel Roth ever produced, albeit all his watches made under his name are instantly recognizable, thanks to the case design. The movement was the Lemania caliber 558, which Roth designed in collaboration with François Bodet, Breguet’s director, and Lemania (which is now Manufacture Breguet). That movement had originally appeared in the Breguet 3550, which was a kind of summary of Breguet’s most iconic design features, but reinterpreted for a wristwatch.
The 3550 is a round watch, with a coin-edge case, Bregeut-style hands, and Roman numerals on the hour chapter ring; the hours and minutes are in a small sundial in the upper half of the watch. The dial is divided into an upper and lower level, with the upper level decorated with guilloché patterns, and the lower level engraved with a floral motif forming the background for the tourbillon. The tourbillon sits under a polished steel bridge and, mounted on the upper pivot of the cage, there is a three-pronged seconds hand – each of the three prongs takes its turn sweeping across a sector marked out in 20 second increments, and the prongs are three different thicknesses, to distinguish between the first, second, or third part of a minute.
The tourbillon is given pride of place – this is not the first tourbillon wristwatch with the tourbillon visible through the dial; that distinction goes to the Audemars Piguet 24643 – but it set the stage for all subsequent modern tourbillons which make the cage visible on the dial side. The very few tourbillon wristwatches made prior to the AP 24643 and the Breguet 3550 were all traditionally constructed, with the tourbillon visible only on the back of the movement, and of course Breguet’s own pocket tourbillons did not have the carriage visible through the dial either.
Daniel Roth’s C187 tourbillon was, naturally, an extension of his work for Breguet but in working for himself, he created a design language which was very distinct from Breguet’s and which made his watches immediately recognizable as Daniel Roth timepieces, not Breguet watches. The most noticeable and obvious difference was in the case shape. Roth used a double ellipse case, which was a kind of combination of a round and rectangular case – the design featured straight sides, with curved edges at the top and bottom. As with the Breguet 3550, the tourbillon was the star of the show – Roth used the same movement in the C187 as in the 3550, albeit with a differently shaped mainplate, to fit the case. The same three-pronged seconds used in the 3550 is present in the C187, and both watches feature guilloché patterns on the upper surface of the dial.
The first C187 tourbillons were ordered by the English retailer Asprey; the order was for 24 watches. The C187 tourbillons were eventually made in a number of different metals (including stainless steel) and the dials featured either a clous de Paris pattern, or vertical pinstripes – the latter seem to be more common and to represent later production, perhaps in order to avoid too close a resemblance to the design of the 3550.
After the sale of Daniel Roth by The Hour Glass to Bulgari in 2000, production of Daniel Roth watches gradually declined, although there were some spectacular complicated watches made under the name, and using the double ellipse case (including, in 2014, a carillon tourbillon minute repeater). However, the rebirth of Daniel Roth as a separate brand, rather than a sub-brand under the Bulgari umbrella, was announced earlier this year, and now, LVMH Daniel Roth has just announced the first watch under the new independent structure.
Naturally, the first new watch from the reborn brand will be a tourbillon. It is at first glance nearly identical to the C187 but with some subtle updates to distinguish the new Tourbillon Souscription from its predecessor.
All the movements for the new Daniel Roth timepieces will be constructed entirely in-house at Louis Vuitton’s manufacturing center, La Fabrique du Temps, outside Geneva. The new tourbillon caliber DR001 supports the same basic architecture as the Lemania 558, but the design of the bridges and configuration of the going train represents a major departure from the original. The crown of the Tourbillon Souscription is stamped with an outline of the double ellipse case shape, and while the original has straight lugs, the Tourbillon Souscription’s lugs have a slight downward curvature. Louis Vuitton’s Jean Arnault has said that the idea is to respect the original design as much as possible in every detail, while at the same time with some details which show where the new watches stand in the history of the brand’s production.
The Tourbillon Souscription is an haute horlogerie piece of watchmaking through and through. The movement is hand finished throughout and the elaborate construction of the case, dial and heat-blued three-pointed seconds hand all reflect the unhurried, meticulous, very traditional-craft approach that characterized Daniel Roth’s production of the original C187. The Tourbillon Souscription has one other feature which reflects the traditional orientation of its design: the caseback is solid, and engraved with the number of each watch
The construction of the new Daniel Roth watches will take place under the supervision of La Fabrique du Temps’ Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, who have worked together for many years and whose professional backgrounds share some elements of Daniel Roth’s. Roth himself is part of the relauch as well, and his creative input was part of the relaunch of the brand, as well as the launch of the Tourbillon Souscription. Navas says, “Our vision for Daniel Roth is to respect the brand’s history while also leveraging the concepts and savoir faire that Enrico and myself have accumulated in our careers,” and Barbasi has remarked, “Respecting the origins of the brand and the craftsmanship of its foundational pieces is especially important for us, since we are both long-time friends of Daniel … many of us look up to Daniel as an important figure in the industry, who spearheaded contemporary independent watchmaking.”
As you might have guessed from the name, the Tourbillon Souscription will be sold on a subscription basis. Daniel Roth himself did not use the subscription model in his initial offering of the C187 – the patronage of Asprey was what allowed him to begin production of his watches – but the subscription model is a sort of call-out to Breguet himself, who used the subscription model for some of his own timepieces. The Tourbillon Souscription will be a limited edition of 20 pieces, and those interested will be invited to place a 50% deposit on the retail price of CHF 140,000. The balance will be payable on delivery, which is expected to be in early 2024.
For someone like myself who was familiar with Daniel Roth’s original work, the value proposition is compelling. Of all the watches released under the Daniel Roth name since the acquisition by Bulgari in 2000, this is the one that feels most like a direct continuation of the brand. The elegance, refinement and excellence in construction and design found in Daniel Roth’s original C187 tourbillon is very much present in the Tourbillon Souscription, and then some – with its careful updates to the original design, as well as its thoughtful technical improvements on the original Lemania caliber (the DR001, for instance, has an 80 hour power reserve) it is a watch that’s a reminder of just how strong the appeal of classic, genuine horological content, combined with a timeless but distinctive design, can be.
Jean Arnault, who is at the helm of Daniel Roth and who is an enthusiastic collector of vintage watches in his own right (including Daniel Roth’s original watches), has said that the Tourbillon Souscription is not just a significant and significantly beautiful watch in itself, but also the opening move in what he, Navas and Barbasini, and Daniel Roth himself, hope to be a very long game. The horological heritage of Daniel Roth is extremely rich and there is every reason to hope that the Tourbillon Souscription is the predecessor to a re-imagining of the brand overall that is as much of the present, and respectful to the past, as the Tourbillon Souscription itself.
The Daniel Roth Tourbillon Souscription: Case, 18k yellow gold, 38.6mm x 35.5mm x 9.2mm; 20mm lug width, with flat AR coated sapphire crystal; lug width 20mm. Dial, 18k yellow gold with Clous de Paris guilloché, engraved DANIEl ROTH with watch number; Côtes de Genève on either side of the tourbillon with frosted finish on the plate below.
Movement, caliber DR001, hand-wound one-minute tourbillon, 4.6mm thick; cage, 460mg; flat balance spring, running at 21,600vph/3Hz in 19 jewels. Developed and assembled by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton.
Brown calfskin leather strap with 18k gold pin buckle.
Limited edition of 20 pieces, “souscription” with 50% downpayment on price of CHF 140,000, balance payable on delivery.
Find out more at DanielRoth.com.