The Vacheron Constantin Cornes de Vache 1955

The chronograph by and large is a complication which we are used to seeing in sports watches, or at least, in watches with some technical orientation. There are exceptions of course but if you close your eyes and think of a chronograph, you’re apt to visualize a Rolex Daytona, or an Omega Speedmaster, or a Breitling Navitimer – in other words a watch in which split seconds timing is at the service of some larger purpose, whether it’s timing laps at the track, or doing fuel consumption over time and distance calculations.

The dress chronograph, on the other hand, is first and foremost of course an instrument, like its more pragmatic brethren, for measuring periods of elapsed time, but the overall package is at least as important as an exercise in style and personal expression, as it is an exercise in technical watchmaking. To really sit up and sing, a dress chronograph should have a movement that is as excellent in its formal characteristics as watch overall. You don’t need to have an elevated movement to have a dress chronograph, but to some extent a watch designed as a dress chronograph which has an industrially produced supplied movement is an illustration of a dress chronograph, rather than the thing itself. (There is nothing wrong with that, either – you can buy and enjoy any watch primarily on the basis of design but it is always nice when the coachwork and what’s under the hood are at the same level).

Thanks to the expense involved in making an haute horlogerie chronograph, the dress chronograph genre in any given year is a tiny if elegant principality in the larger domain of chronographs in general. Technical chronographs can make us feel like Steve McQueen or Nikki Lauda; like Jim Lovell or Buzz Aldrin; like a steely-eyed, iron-nerved Master Of The Air who by gosh and by gum is gettin’ home on a wing and a prayer.

For those days, however, when you want to feel like the son of a careless British peer who has lost most of the family fortune at the gaming table at the club, and who is as a result doing a little extracurricular espionage work as a side hustle from his gig as the Swiss correspondent for the Times and who is not above motoring down to Monaco with a Dangerous Balkan Contessa in passenger seat of a fine Armstrong-Hepworth motorcar with a Maybach aero engine under the hood, may I recommend a watch that achieves its timelessness paradoxically by seeming of that time: The Vacheron Constantin Cornes de Vache Les Historiques 1955 (5000H/000R-B059).

1955 is a little later than the date of the Art Deco era Walter Mitty fantasy outlined above, but I think you will see that the C de V 1955 is sufficiently broad in its elegance to fit into a quite wide range of imagined personal experiences rooted in several different eras. The design of the Cornes de Vache Les Historiques 1955 is based on a vintage model, the reference 6087, nicknamed the “Cornes de Vache” – “cow horns” in French – for its elegantly shaped lugs. The original model from 1955 is 35mm in diameter, in keeping with the tastes of the era, although nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if a 35mm version of the current Cornes de Vache could find an audience. The movement of the original watch was the Vacheron 492, based on the venerable 13 ligne Valjoux 23 which was produced, remarkably enough, from 1916 all the way up to 1974, and it is an interesting historical footnote that after the 6087 Vacheron did not produce another chronograph until 1989.

The new version of the Cornes de Vache was introduced by Vacheron in 2015 and since then it has been produced in several different case materials, including stainless steel (which may seem an odd choice for a luxury dress chronograph until you recall that stainless steel haute horlogerie watches were a real rarity before the 1970s – some of the rarest and most collectible vintage Pateks, for instance, are stainless steel models.

The Cornes de Vache is now a slightly larger watch than its ancestor, at 38.5mm x 10.9mm but it is still very much in the current sweet spot for enthusiasts who want a watch whose size feels like a connection to watchmaking tradition and history. The watch taken as a design piece, is as successful now as it was in 1955 – maybe more so, since we now look at the design with an appreciation born of hindsight – and it has a combination of urbane restraint, plus the slightly whimsical note sounded by the lugs, that really represents mid-20th century Vacheron Constantin design well. The chronograph is a two register design – which has always seemed to me more suitable for a dress chronograph; needless to say there are exceptions but the balance and lack of clutter you get from two subdials instead of three just feels a little more aristocratic. Maybe it’s the implied message that you don’t have the attention span for longer periods of time than half an hour and you don’t need to have one either – that’s what Jeeves (or whomever) is for. And no nonsense about a date window either – as with tracking elapsed hours, one has people for that.

When you turn the watch over, though, you really see proof of the thesis that a dress chronograph ought to have a movement that measures up to the aspirations of the design.

The movement in the Cornes de Vache is the Vacheron Constantin caliber 1142, which has a history that actually goes back further than the date of introduction of the original Cornes de Vache ref. 6087. The caliber 1142 is based on the Lemania caliber 2320. The 2320 is a 21 jewel variant of the Lemania 2310, which began life as the project 27 CHRO C12, developed jointly by Omega and Lemania (the latter is now Manufacture Breguet). 27 CHRO C12 was also produced by Omega as the caliber 321, which Omega most famously used in the Speedmaster up to about 1968. The 2320 has also been used by Breguet and Patek Philippe.

It is as beautiful a classic, lateral clutch, column wheel chronograph as you could possibly want, with all the logic, elegance, and fineness of execution you would expect from a mid-century chronograph designed, finished to the standards of Vacheron and the Geneva Seal (which is stamped on the balance cock; the Geneva Seal is an independent quality standard for watches and movements administered for many decades by the Geneva Watchmaking School, and currently administered by TimeLab and the city and canton of Geneva). The Geneva Seal is rather strict in its requirements and the stipulations range from the easily understandable (no wire springs – those are yucky) to a requirement that the lever of the escapement have “solid bankings” (the reasoning behind which is a story in itself).

Certainly it is absolutely true that the 1142 gives up not an inch in terms of quality to the vintage Vacheron caliber 492. The entire vocabulary of classic Swiss-French movement finishing has been lavished on the movement, and the execution is all the more attractive for its restraint – in a time when movement finishing has become somewhat fetishized it’s always great to see a movement finished to a high standard, but which also stays true to the basic fact that high end movement finishing is both a decorative craft of great difficulty, as well as a natural extension of simple good work practices.

I have a great weakness for the Cornes de Vache. Not only does its design and execution support a whole plethora of timidly adventurous Walter Mitty fantasies long outmoded (the Dangerous Contessas have been replaced by transnational cybercrime gangs practicing ransomware attacks and taking payout in Bitcoin which, call me a fuddy duddy, I find somehow less romantic) the watch is also a great example of how a great watch used to be made, and in some ways is still made today. The use of a top quality supplied caliber, finished at Vacheron to an historically respected and historically meaningful standard, all with a case and dial design which is one of the brightest fixed stars in the constellations of watchmaking, all makes the Cornes de Vache one of the rarest kinds of watches available today – proof that sometimes they really do make ’em like they used to.

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