The Vacheron Constantin Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin Skeleton
A perpetual calendar that’s an aristocrat among its peers.
Innovation can be a wonderful thing. It can bring us untold practical and cultural benefits – we all love antibiotics, convenient air travel, ready access to a global network of unparalleled computing power, and iced beverages on demand. However, there are times when what you want is not the latest, greatest, most high tech, or most convenient version of something. What you want, instead, is something done the good old fashioned way; something made without the maker considering economies of scale or economies of manufacturing … or, really, any economies at all.
Industrialized watchmaking has given pleasure and convenience to millions, as well as ensuring that the industrial base for watchmaking is healthy, for which we can all be thankful and that goes for the brands as well – be they high or low. However, fine watchmaking, for all that the term is invoked so often its a wonder that it has any power at all, is like any other traditional craft, something that requires adherence to methods and materials which have been painstakingly refined over several centuries, and which have in the last fifty years survived against sometimes considerable odds.
This week, for A Watch A Week, I submit for your consideration a watch that represents, as much as any watch does today, those methods and materials. The Vacheron Constantin Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin Skeleton is not exactly as uncompromisingly fully hand-made as, say the Naissance d’un Montre series, but the latter was specifically designed to be willfully anachronistic, and with the use only of tools that might have been familiar to, say, Breguet, during his heyday in Paris. It is, however, a representative of watchmaking as a celebration of a traditional philosophy about what fine watchmaking is and can be.
The Birth Of The Overseas
The Overseas watches have deeper roots than you might think, with a family tree that goes all the way back to the Vacheron 222 (which has in the last twenty years gone from being a niche collectible with relatively low level of interest among collectors, to one of the hottest watches on Earth. Is there a waiting list? Oh, yeah, there’s a waiting list). The 222 begat the 333, which was in turn followed by the Phidias (named after a famous Athenian sculptor) one of which Tim Mosso covered in a recent video review. The modern Overseas watch was introduced in 1996, and that watch was recognizably the progenitor of the Overseas we now know it. (Monochrome has an excellent overview of the timeline of the Vacheron Overseas and its predecessors).
The first Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin was introduced at the SIHH, in 2016 and at the time it was one of a small handful of watches using the ultra thin caliber 1120, which was produced by JLC as the caliber 920 and used by AP as the caliber 2120/1 (most famously in the Jumbo) and by Patek, as the caliber 28-255. The movement was fulsomely praised by Walt Odets, in 2002 and his article is still worth reading (he was also the man responsible for basically inventing the online technical watch review).
The Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin Skeleton
The Overseas Perpetual Ultra Thin Skeleton goes the original VC Overseas Perpetual Ultra Thin one better, by openworking, or skeletonizing, one of the thinnest self-winding movements ever made – in fact, the 1120/2120/28-255/920 is still, to this day, the thinnest full rotor self-winding movement ever made. It is a piece of watchmaking history as important, at least, as any of the watches that it made possible and I know I’m a little bit of a broken record on the subject, but I still think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of work ever to come out of Switzerland. Walt Odets wrote, ” Inarguably, this caliber … is among the most beautiful wristwatch movements ever produced.” The movement is now almost completely discontinued – Vacheron and Audemars Piguet both still use it, but only in complicated watches.
Openworking any movement requires great care as the goal is to make the movement as transparent as possible – which means removing as much metal as possible – without compromising the movement’s functionality. The way to do this traditionally was to use a piercing file and saw, but nowadays the openworking – although not the finishing of the newly created surfaces – is usually done with a spark erosion machine. Openworking means that the job of finishing the movement becomes exponentially more complex.
Another one of the pleasures of an openworked perpetual calendar is that you have an open dial to go along with it, which means that the perpetual calendar mechanism – which, like the mechanism for a minute repeater, is usually hidden under the dial – is visible.
In terms of layout, this is a traditional design very much in harmony with the classic fine watchmaking on display in the movement. One interesting feature of the watch is the month display. You’ll notice that the month display doesn’t show just 12 months; instead, it shows the months for a full four year cycle of the perpetual calendar. Vacheron achieves this by only printing a three letter month abbreviation for every third month, with two small markers in between each abbreviation. It takes a little getting used to but it allows the movement to be very compact. It’s rare but not unheard of for a brand to have a 48 month display in a wristwatch perpetual calendar – Audemars Piguet has done so, to pick just one example.
There is an old saying that real luxury is what it is thanks to rarity of materials and rarity of skills. In other words, a luxury object takes as long as it takes, and it costs whatever it costs. The Overseas Ultra Thin Perpetual is a rare watch for all of these reasons – the movement is extremely rare, as are the skills necessary to make it, and to openwork it, and the elaborate case and bracelet (which are extremely comfortable and wear their complexity lightly) are in their own way as much a triumph of watchmaking as the mechanism. In a way, it almost seems a watch from another era – from a time before the advent of mass luxury and the effects of international luxury group ownership changed how even fine watchmaking expresses itself. It’s something of a miracle that this watch exists at all, and to own it is to own not just a piece of history, but an example what fine watchmaking really used to mean, and what (in some cases) it can still mean.