The Paradoxical, Perplexing, And Profound Parmigiani Fleurier Chronograph Mysterieux
Horology’s most fascinating vanishing act.
Parmigiani Fleurier has undergone a number of transitions over the course of the company’s history. Launched in 1999, the company has had collaborations with Bugatti, and produced calendar complications which include the Islamic, East Asian lunar, annual, and perpetual calendars, and created a whole range of smaller complications, as well as some fantastically elaborate clocks. The company has recently explored the possibilities of flyback hands in the Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante, in which the local and home time hands are superimposed – however, the local hour time hand can be advanced in one hour increments via a case pusher, revealing the home time hand as well; the two hands can be brought back together by pushing the button co-axial with the crown, and unless you’re traveling, the watch simply looks like a rather elegant, sleekly modern two handed time-only watch.
This year Parmigiani Fleurier introduced a watch which takes the same basic concept, but applies it to the chronograph. The Chronograph Mystérieux, like the PF GMT Rattrapante, appears to be a simple time-only watch; the only difference between it and the GMT Rattrapante is that the Chronograph Mystérieux has a seconds hand.
Parmigiani Fleurieur has in the past had a wider range of case shapes than today, including the barrel shaped Kalpa case, with its teardrop lugs; today, there are just two – the Tonda PF, which is an integrated bracelet design (although it’s possible to get Tonda PF watches on OEM made-to-fit straps as well) and the more traditional Toric, which has the same knurled bezel as the Tonda, but with conventional lugs. The Kapla case was used in the past to house shaped movements, including a very attractive and interesting eight-day hand-wound caliber, but in recent years, Parmigiani Fleurier has been concentrating on streamlining its catalog (an undertaking at which it has been largely successful; historically, the designs from Parmigiani Fleurier were diverse but could also feel unfocused) and a kind of radical simplicity is now very much the company’s dominant design ethos. This has led to a very specific and quite distinctive design language and Parmigiani Fleurier has gone from the somewhat confusing plethora of different designs, to a constrained range of design cues which succeed in being recognizable without seeming derivative – which is a tough trick.
The Chronograph Mystérieux is like the Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante, a watch with a trick up its sleeve. The only indication that there is more than meets the eye is the pusher at 8:00, which has a teardrop shape that echoes the lines of the lugs (a shape which has been a signature of Parmigiani Fleurier case designs since the Kalpa case launched in 1998.
The pusher is the activating button for the monopusher chronograph. The chronograph hour and minute hands are superimposed on the civil time hour and minute hands. At the first press, the chronograph hands jump to the zero position, as does the running seconds hand; the civil time hour and minute hands, which have been exposed, and are colored gold, continue to show the time. The action is like that of a flyback chronograph; the chronograph hands begin to run immediately after hitting the zero mark.
Press the pusher a second time, and the chronograph stops – the chronograph hours, minutes, and center seconds hand all freeze in place and you can read the elapsed time. Press it one more time, and the chronograph hands resume their position superimposed over the civil time hour and minute hands. The seconds hand will begin to run, but it will start running from wherever its position was when you stopped the chronograph, which means that it’s desynchronized from the civil time hour and minute hands.
It’s quite a technical accomplishments, albeit with caveats. The first is legibility – the civil time hands are gold colored but in practice, thanks to their shape and reflectivity, it’s hard at a glance to tell which set of hands is which, especially if the chronograph has been running for a while. It’s not as much of an issue in strong light, and honestly I don’t think the design would have been well served by making the color difference more pronounced; it would have been jarring in the larger context of the watch. Maybe a heavier gold coating, or the use of a rose gold alloy, would improve things to some degree. The other gotcha is the fact that while the Parmigiani Fleurier Chronograph Mystérieux does have a stop seconds function, you should expect the seconds hand to largely not be synchronized to the minute hand – for instance, depending on when you reset the chronograph hands to their zero position, the seconds hand can be as much as thirty seconds off from the minute hand, showing (for instance) that it’s thirty seconds past the nearest minute, when the minute hand is right on one of the minute markers.
This is largely a conceptual problem since the desynchronization is not really noticeable unless you are looking for it, or unless you like to set your watches by the NIST clock at Time.gov and see what your daily gain or loss in rate comes to. I would bear in mind, if you’re interested in this watch (and it is enormously interesting) that you think of the seconds hand, unless the chronograph is running, as a function indicator; the purpose of this watch is not to provide absolute instant legibility in both elapsed and civil timekeeping, but rather, to provide a unique, kinetic visual experience: to entertain, in other words.
It’s a beautiful watch, overall, both front and back; the movement, in-house (it couldn’t be anything else) caliber PF053 is technically unique and visually beautiful, with a motif of circular bridges that Parmigiani Fleurier first used in 2017, in the Tonda Chronor Anniversaire. There is something very modern and at the same time, very archaic about this watch. The technical achievement is ingenious and undoubtedly benefited from modern watchmaking’s ability to prototype in software, and from CNC and spark erosion machining. It’s also true, however, that this is a rare example of a modern complicated watch which is designed to produce a charming, emotionally engaging, and unusual effect, and in that respect it’s closer to an automaton watch or clock, than it is to the chronograph.
The chronograph complication in the Chronograph Mystérieux, in this sense, is not the final goal so much as it is a kind of conceptual architecture for what is, given the sleek minimialism of the rest of the design, a form of mechanical performance art that aims to create emotion with its unexpected visual dynamics, rather than be an exercise in cutting edge timekeeping precision per se.
It took a lot of chutzpah to produce this watch – the whole conception is wildly different from anything else that anyone has ever tried in the world of chronograph watches, and I don’t have any doubt that the question of the chronograph seconds hand occurred to Parmigiani Fleurier’s engineers while they were working on prototyping the design. The seconds hand is used to evaluate the precision of a watch, under normal circumstances; but here, it’s been repurposed as a participating player in a highly sophisticated game of now you see it, now you don’t.
The Parmigiani Fleurier Chronograph Mystérieux: case, stainless steel, with platinum bezel; 40mm x 13mm, water resistance 100M with sapphire crystals front and back. Mineral blue dial, hand guilloché with “grain d’Orge” pattern and hand applied 18k gold applied indexes. Movement, caliber PF053, automatic with integrated column wheel controlled “mystery” flyback chronograph; 60 hour power reserve, running at 28,800 vph in 41 jewels. Price, $44,600; for more info, visit Parmigiani.com.