Gerald Genta Introduces The New ‘Only Watch 2023,’ A Jump Hour Retrograde Minute Repeater
“I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.” –Walt Disney, 1954
Gérald Genta is a man who needs no introduction, at least in the increasingly wide world of watch enthusiasts. His name is synonymous with the Royal Oak, but, according to Genta himself, he was responsible for, without exaggeration, thousands of watch designs over the course of his working life. His work for other brands, including Omega, Universal, Patek, and many others, remains to this day what he is best remembered for, but Genta was not happy to just create designs for clients – he wanted to fulfill his own, very particular vision of what watches and fine watchmaking could be, and in his view, should be. To get out from under the demands of others, he started his own brand, under his own name, in 1969.
Genta was a man of many, and sometimes conflicting, impulses. If there was a single theme that characterized his own work, it was probably a love of complexity as an end in itself – his case designs were baroquely ornate and he was in his time, along with the movement constructors who worked with him, responsible for some of the most superlatively and exuberantly complex watches anyone has ever made. His grande et petite sonnerie, minute repeater, with tourbillon, reference G.0027.7, is a case in point.
It is extremely complex and floridly ornate. I usually think of a gold-plated Aztec step pyramid when I see it. But it is also classically sized at 39mm in diameter, and its design is an example of the iconoclastic side of Genta’s character. He is after all the man who got thrown out of the Montres et Bijoux watch show in Geneva, in 1984, for showing luxury watches with cartoon characters on the dial.
The Man And The Brand
Genta’s brand produced an enormous variety of watches but in 1996, the retailer The Hour Glass bought a majority share, and in 2000, the brand was acquired in turn by Bulgari, which in its own turn was acquired by LVMH in 2011. The rights to the Genta brand passed to LVMH along with Daniel Roth. Roth and Genta co-branded watches were produced by Bulgari, but over the last couple of years, both brands have been split off from Bulgari and are now independent marques – still under the LVMH umbrella, but separate brands. The first new Daniel Roth watch was announced earlier this year – a very beautiful and respectful new version of Roth’s tourbillon reference C187, which reassured us that the intention at LVMH, was to stick to the basic identity of each brand and to, as much as possible, make the watches that the founders would have made today.
Daniel Roth, who has been making a very beautiful two minute tourbillon under the name Jean Daniel Nicolas, for many years, has been part of the relaunch of Daniel Roth at LVMH. Genta passed away in 2011, but is survived by his wife, Evelyne, who provided LVMH with access to her late husband’s archives, including a plethora of designs that had never made it into production.
Birthdays And Rebirth
Some of Genta’s most famous watch designs were character watches – one of the earliest was a watch showing the Pink Panther, but he also produced watches with Disney characters as well, including Mickey Mouse. A combination of a retrograde minute hand, with a minute repeater and a Disney character, was something he’d considered but never actually attempted to make. The Only Watch 2023 is therefore a Genta first – created to both mark the rebirth of the Gerald Genta brand, and in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney company, as well as the 10th anniversary of Only Watch – the biennial benefit watch auction held to support research into therapies and, eventually, a cure, for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
The Only Watch 2023 is a classic example of Genta’s trademark sense of humor, and his enthusiasm for combining pop culture and fine watchmaking. The image is as light-hearted as you could want, with Mickey caught in a celebratory dance, and holding a birthday cake to mark the Only Watch and Disney anniversaries (and I imagine the rebirth of the brand as well). At the bottom of each hour, Mickey’s retrograde minute hand snaps back to zero at the same instant that the jumping hour switches in the window at 3:00. The pusher for activating the minute repeater is at 9:00.
Behind the whimsy, however, is a great deal of watchmaking craftsmanship.
The dial, first of all, is grand feu – oven-fired – vitreous enamel. The particular style of enameling is called champlevé, in which recesses are engraved into a metal surface and then filled with colored enamel.
That technique is well suited to the crisp, clearly delineated areas of color that define the graphic elements of the dial and the cartoon heritage of the image.
The design of the dial was a collaboration between the Walt Disney company and Gerald Genta, and that partnership will continue moving forward – there will be other Genta and Disney collaborations in the future.
The technical development of the watch and the overall execution of the project was overseen by Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, and for both, this was something of a labor of love, as both watchmakers had worked with Genta himself.
Custodians Of Genta: Michel Navas And Enrico Barbasini
Navas and Barbasini shared their experiences working with Genta, and with creating the Only Watch 2023 jump hour, retrograde, minute repeater complication at La Fabrique du Temps, where both the Gerald Genta and Daniel Roth watches are made, as well as Louis Vuitton’s own high complications.
Why combine these complications in a single watch?
Michel Navas says, “For us, this was an obvious direction … we thought about what defined Gérald Genta the most, and, aside from the octagonal shape, the minute repeater and retrograde immediately stood out … the minute repeater has always been one of Mr. Genta’s favorites. Let’s not forget that he designed one of the first ultra-thin minute repeaters back in 1981, with a movement of a mere 2.72mm thickness, when almost no one believed in traditional watchmaking anymore. Definitely a bold move!”
Barbasini adds, “Michel and I both worked with Mr. Genta, so we really wanted to start with a piece that the Maestro himself would have dreamt of making … as you know, Gérald Genta loved Disney characters and was bold enough to combine them with high complication watchmaking from 1984 onwards … once, he even sketched a minute repeater watch with a minute retrograde indicated by the swiveling arm of Mickey. That piece was never made, so it is very meaningful to us to launch it today as the first Gérald Genta watch under the brand’s revival.”
How does the Only Watch 2023 reflect Genta’s personal design vision?
Michel Navas says, “The case, first, is reminiscent of the signature octagonal design of Gérald Genta … you will notice that it shows no sharp edges, which was an important point for Mr. Genta, for whom the case had to be smooth and pleasant to touch. Additionally, we followed Mr. Genta’s requirements for thin and elegant watches – the case of the Only Watch 2023 is very wearable at 40mm, and its thickness has been contained below 11mm, which is quite a feat considering the complications plus the enamel dial.”
What were some of the biggest technical challenges you both faced during the time you worked with Genta himself?
“For me,” says Barbasini, ” the biggest technical challenge was clearly the ultra-thin minute repeater of 1981. Imagine developing such a movement back then, with no computers or automated tools to help. And from then on, we continued in adding complications, including a minute repeater paired with a perpetual calendar, and culminating with the Grande Sonnerie of 1994 and its 1000 components. That was challenging!”
“Mr. Genta was also very picky with the overall elegance and thinness of the watch, as much as with the aesthetic of the movement,” says Navas. “He always wanted his watches to remain chic on the wrist and have finely decorated calibers, often skeletonized, to look as good as the watch. That really gave me and Enrico a lot of challenges, but also an immense amount of satisfaction as we were constantly pushing technical boundaries and achieving what was deemed impossible.”
What were some of the challenges in making a repeater that chimes the time correctly during the interval when the minute hand returns to zero, and the hour indication jumps?
“That is a very interesting point indeed!” says Barbasini. “As you might know, there is a technical challenge in ensuring perfect synchronization between the time chimed … and the time displayed on the dial. With Michel, we capitalized on our extensive experience working alongside of [movement constructor and complications specialist] Pierre-Michel Golay on minute repeater and retrograde minute complications, and developed a technical solution to ensure that perfect synchronization.”
“If you pull the trigger of the repeater and the jump of the minute or the hour is due to happen in less time than the duration of the chime itself, the minute or jump hour is triggered and the watch chimes that exact new elapsed time.
“If instead you pull the trigger and the jump of the minute or hour is due to happen in more time than the duration of the chime, the watch will chime the time being displayed when you initially pulled the trigger.”
“The repeater is therefore as accurate as the displayed time in all circumstances – that is a rarely seen feat, I must say.”
How will the Genta design heritage be reflected in the future trajectory of the brand?
“With Enrico and the whole team,” says Michel Navas, “we will focus first and foremost on reviving the spirit of Mr. Genta, which means being driven by an artistic approach in our projects to offer a refreshing take on haute horlogerie. Gérald Genta was a precursor, a visionary, and a genius watch designer who played a key role in saving the traditional watchmaking industry back in the 1980s and 1990s, with bold design paired with high watchmaking complications.”
“Let’s just look at the Gérald Genta watches that he made with the Disney characters playfully indicating the time. That was very avant-garde, and we will of course pay tribute to this, but we also want to look forward. We will revive the key design elements that became the signature of the Gérald Genta brand, like the smooth octagonal case and contained thickness, but we will also innovate, as Gérald Genta always did, perpetuating his constant quest for excellence in design, and for watchmaking without compromise.”
“The best homage we can give to Mr. Genta is to keep creating, and not only rejuvenate what he already did.”
Back To The Future
The return of the Gérald Genta brand is something that I would have bet really money against ever happening, as recently as just a couple of years ago. It is, for one thing, about as non-commercial an enterprise as I can think of. Of course, I don’t think anyone at La Fabrique du Temps or on the Genta team today is interested in willfully losing money, but it seems clear (to me, anyway) that this was as much as anything can be in today’s watch world, a labor of love.
Genta was, without hyperbole, an enormously important figure in the history of watchmaking. His design language for other brands has permeated the entire world of modern fine watchmaking – although I suppose that we would have found our way to something like the modern luxury integrated sports watch at some point in the 1970s, it is still very hard to imagine that revolution happening without Genta and his partnership with Audemars Piguet and Patek.
Modern luxury watchmaking has a way of erasing its own past. There is a tendency for the unavoidable hyperbole of incessant new product introductions, to encourage a certain kind of forgetfulness about what is sometimes fairly recent history. Genta’s legacy is worth remembering and his vision of combining popular culture with high watchmaking art was revolutionary in the 1980s and in merging classic watch design values with pop culture images, it remains unique today. There are other brands now trawling those waters, but Genta was the first to take what had been a category of technically and aesthetically unremarkable watches – character watches – and elevate them to the level of haute horlogerie.
The enthusiast world is perhaps now in a better position than it was forty years ago to recognize Genta’s unique perspective. It’s entirely appropriate that the first new timepiece from the reborn brand would be a celebration of that legacy. But, as Navas and Barbasini have said, the past is not an end in itself, but an inspiration for new innovations in design and watchmaking. The future chapters of the story of the Gérald Genta brand will necessarily reflect history, but the folks at La Fabrique du Temps seem determined to make sure that the best is yet to come.
The Gérald Genta Only Watch 2023, retrograde minute, jump hour and repeater with Mickey Mouse. Case, white gold, 40mm x 10.96mm; 50 meter water resistance. Champlevé enamel dial created by Nicolas Double at Manufacture La Fabrique du Temps. Movement, caliber GG=001, running at 3Hz in 44 jewels with 80 hour power reserve, developed and made in-house at La Fabrique du Temps; two-hammer minute repeater with centrifugal regulator in octagonal housing. Red rubber strap and white gold tang buckle. Unique piece celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney company and the 10th anniversary of Only Watch, to be auctioned at Only Watch 2023 on November 5th. All appearances of Mickey Mouse©, courtesy Disney Inc.