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De Bethune’s Heritage Collection Showcases Inspiration And Evolution

The Heritage Collection is set to travel the world and give collectors fresh insights into how De Bethune became what it is today.

Jack Forster9 Min ReadSep 24 2024

More than two decades ago, De Bethune launched its first collection, and since then, its design language and technical capabilities have kept pace with each other, through a process of evolution unique in modern watchmaking. One of the most interesting aspects of watchmaking at De Bethune is how technical innovation is intrinsic to aesthetics and essential to De Bethune’s overall design language. Generally speaking, in watchmaking this isn’t the case – much of the time, technical improvements are found in watches whose design is more or less traditional. The fact that technical features and design innovations are so often intertwined can make understanding the evolution of De Bethune a slightly daunting process– it feels less like examining the evolution of an industrial product and industrial design, than it feels like examining the evolution of the work of an artist, whose exploration of new forms of expression can sometimes seem to take wildly unexpected twists and turns.

Of course, in a very real sense, De Bethune’s body of work is the work of an artist – specifically that of watchmaker Denis Flageollet. The thirteen pieces chosen by De Bethune for the Heritage Collection are designed to showcase major inflection points in his work both as a technical watchmaker and a designer, and to underscore the degree to which design, and watchmaking, exist for Denis Flageollet not as two separate entities, but as complementary parts of a unified whole.

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The Heritage Collection consists of thirteen pieces, spanning the ten year period from 2002 to 2013, during which the fundamental elements of De Bethune’s watchmaking were established. This includes the use of the distinctive ogival, or bullet-shaped, lugs, the invention of the articulated lug system found in the DB28, the spherical moonphase, the copious use of heat tempered and blued titanium, and of course, technical innovations like the triple pare-chute antishock system.

De Bethune’s 2024 novelties will be traveling to Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong along with the Heritage Collection, as part of The 1916 Company World Tour. While the Heritage Collection itself is available only to view, from time to time we may be able to source pieces for interested collectors; several watches featured in the collection are currently available. Should you want to enquire about sourcing pieces featured in the collection which are not currently available, let us know and we can begin the process with you (bearing in mind that most of these watches were made in very small numbers and are unlikely to be immediately available). We hope you’ll be able to join us on the World Tour to see the watches in person and if not, look out for opportunities to experience them in the future!

Birth Of De Bethune: Classical But With A Hint Of Things To Come

The first De Bethune watches from the early 2000s, and going all the way back to 2002, clearly foreshadow the more dramatically different designs which followed. They’re very much classic watches in many respects, but they already have a kind of retro-futuristic, almost steampunk feel to them, partly thanks to their size and partly thanks to the case and lug designs.

Zoom InDB1 2002Zoom InDB8 2002Zoom InDB3 GMT 2002

The size, and fondness for the chronograph as a complication, reflects the tastes and influence of both Denis Flageollet and De Bethune’s co-founder, David Zanetta, who is a serious automotive enthusiast and collector, and the ogival lugs are reminiscent of the expressively styled fenders of luxury automobiles from the 1930s – cars like the Bugatti Type 57, or the famous Aérolithe.

Zoom InDB12 2003

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Inevitably, open casebacks appeared almost immediately; the 2003 DB12 was the first watch from De Bethune to have a display back, to show the Venus chronograph caliber 175 adopted for the watch. As time went by, the distinction between movement and dial would become increasingly blurred, as De Bethune’s movement architecture approached the form in which we know it today.

The Move To In-House Movements, New Movement Design, And Groundbreaking Technical Innovations

Zoom InDB15 Perpetual Calendar, 2004

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The DB 15 Perpetual calendar was the first De Bethune watch to debut with a De Bethune in-house movement, and the movement was the launch platform for De Bethune’s novel blued titanium and platinum balance, the triple pare-chute antishock system, and De Bethune’s patented self-centering flat balance spring. On the dial side is De Bethune’s signature spherical moonphase, with the dark side in heat-blued steel.

Zoom InDBS 2005

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In the DBS, we see for the first time the movement surfacing, so to speak, to the dial side of the watch. In just three years, De Bethune had introduced a radical new movement architecture to the world of modern watchmaking, and made it the centerpiece of the watch. The DBS brought together a number of different inspirations evident in part in the earlier watches – the ogival lugs are present, and the pocket watch feel from the  2002 and 2003 launches, evident in their case shapes and diameters, is here made more overt by placing the crown at 12:00. The entire movement has been inverted from its position in the DB15, and rotated 45 degrees to put the crown in its new position. The DBS was also the first De Bethune watch to incorporate a floating lug design.

Zoom InDB17 2005

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The same year, De Bethune showed its continued ability to create watches in a classical vein as well. The DB17 was an updated version of the DB15, with some design changes intended to improve visibility and create a stronger visual statement.

Brave New Worlds: Complications, Starry Skies, Science Fiction

In 2006, De Bethune introduced one of the most technically advanced and visually bold complications of the entire modern post-quartz watch era. That watch is the Maxichrono. The Maxichrono is a monopusher chronograph, which is a bit of a return to form for De Bethune as its first watch was a monopusher chronograph, but the Maxichrono took the unprecedented step of placing all five hands – hour, minutes, and chronograph seconds, minutes, and hours – all on one axis at the center of the watch. This required a complete restructuring of a traditional chronograph movement.

Zoom InDB 21 Maxichrono 2006

The case has double floating lugs in blued titanium, and although the ogival lugs are diminished they’re still very much present.

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Zoom InDBD Digitale 2006

The DBD Digitale was released the same year as the Maxichrono, and follows the same basic case design as the DBS, with the crown at 12:00 under a floating lug. Here, however, De Bethune chose to look back not only to the Art Deco era of automotive design, but also to the Art Deco design language of watchmaking as well. The Digitale  shows the day, date, and month in line at the top of the dial, with dragging seconds at the center, and a jumping hour window at 6:00. The entire surface of the dial is decorated with Geneva stripes, which are usually used to decorate movement plates and bridges in traditional watchmaking, and they’re also reminiscent of the engine-turned perlage-type decoration which can be found on vintage car – and aircraft – instrument panels.

The DBD was yet another way of expressing the fascination of mechanics, only this time, and in contrast to the DBS, the movement is present on the dial in an evocative rather than literal way – and the watch is also proof that De Bethune was equally comfortable working in a minimalist design vocabulary and understood the value of negative space.

Zoom InDB25 L 2010

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The 2010 DB25 continues the them of integrating mechanical elements and design cues on the dial and movement side of the watch, but in a classical vein which can still be seen in modern De Bethune watches like the DB28xs Aérolite. The lugs here are fixed, and the relative simplicity of the dial is matched by the clean, crisply decorated layout of the delta-shaped movement bridges, whose Geneva stripes are echoed in the sunray brushing on the dial (which is divided into 12 subtly delineated sectors, matching the hours).

Zoom InDB25T 2011

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The 2011 DB25T – for tourbillon – was launched in 2011 and introduced another new feature to De Bethune’s watches – a center jumping seconds, driven by a sawtoothed gear wheel system located under an openworked bridge in blued titanium. Heat blued titanium is used for the bridge of the tourbillon cage as well, which rotates once every 30 seconds – twice as fast as a conventional one-minute tourbillon. The dial is in heat-blued titanium as well, with gold stars, and in its combination of classical simplicity and technical modernity, the watch as a whole shows De Bethune’s ability to innovate in both design and technical watchmaking, while at the same time ensuring a seamless continuity between the two.

Zoom InDB28 ‘Aiguille d’Or’ 2012

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The DB28 “Aiguille d’Or” was originally developed as a unique piece for Only Watch 2009, and was released as a series produced watch in 2012. It is a kind of summing up of all that De Bethune had achieved over the previous decade. The articulated lugs are a defining feature of the DB28 series, and the movement and dial are one and the same entity. Here we can see just how well the subtly asymmetric delta bridge of the movement lends itself to placement on the dial side, and how it undermines the conventional notion that the dial and movement are two separate entities.

All of De Bethune’s most important innovations are visible, including the triple pare-chute system, spherical moonphase, and self-centering flat balance spring, and the balance itself is a real piece of horological exotica – it’s a solid disk of pure silicon crystal, with a rim of palladium. The design is almost completely free of aerodynamic drag, and the design places the majority of the mass of the balance on the rim, where it needs to be in order to enable the balance to better resist changes in rate during movement of the watch.

Zoom InDB28 Skybridge 2013

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And the DB28 Skybridge is both a gesture to the past and a token of the future. The science fiction inspiration that is increasingly present in De Bethune watches as the years go by, is here explicitly visible in the dial design, which is the shape of a Golden Age science fiction rocketship – a bridge to the sky in the most literal sense. Complexity is celebrated, but here with a kind of purity and simplicity which puts the contrast of finishes, including blued titanium, front and center. It’s the most literally space-age watch of the Heritage Collection, but it’s also deeply rooted in traditional watchmaking and traditional watchmaking values, albeit transformed and transmuted in entirely unexpected ways.