The Quest for Perfection.
Girard-Perregaux: a symbol of Swiss Haute Horlogerie for over two hundred years. In fact, it was created in Geneva in 1791 by the genius of Jean-François Bautte who, even in his twenties, created his first clocks in that year. His technical/artistic and entrepreneurial skills quickly led him to expand his fame and his business also abroad, even to be cited by important writers such as Pushkin and others.
Another fundamental character in the history of this brand is Constant Girard who, together with his wife, Marie Perregaux, founded Girard-Perregaux in 1856. Constant was in fact an innovator, who through his experiments proposed cutting-edge models, winners of numerous international awards. One of these, the Tourbillon 3 Golden Ponts , won the Universal Exhibition in Paris and becomes the icon of the brand. But it is not enough, Constant in 1880 also invented … the “wristwatch”: an idea truly revolutionary for those times, so that it will only be established later, in the twentieth century.
And it was at the beginning of the 20th century (1906) that Girard-Perregaux acquired the Maison Bautte, uniting the respective traditions of refined aesthetics and technological innovation to meet the challenges that the new century brought with it. Since then, countless models and collections have marked the history of watchmaking, such as the Sea Hawk waterproof model in the ’40s, or the Gyromatic HF (1966), the first with a high frequency movement (the barbell beats to 36,000 alternations/hour) which revolutionizes the world of chronometry, or among the first quartz watches such as the Elcron (1970) or the introduction for the first time in the world of models with a quartz vibration frequency set at 32.768 Hertz, which became the universally adopted standard. Still recently (2013) Girard-Perregaux continues with its tradition of technological avant-garde introducing the revolutionary “Costant Escapement L.M.” that allows to reach a precision of the movements never imagined before.
Gorgeous objects, of very high precision, close to the symbolic concept of “Perfection” present themselves in different collections: Bridges, Graduate, 1966, Cat’s Eye, Competition, Vintage 1945 and Heritage, with many models able to satisfy the most refined and the most demanding requests. Real jewels, in some cases sculpted, painted and modeled by skilled goldsmiths, such as some models “Tourbillon 3 ponts” or the Limited Edition “The Chamber of Wonders” series. A “universe” in which we can lose and of which we propose here only a small selection of images, certain that fans and lovers of “beauty” will not fail to deepen their knowledge and satisfy their own sight on the web site of the manufacturer.
Swiss Haute Horlogerie Depuis 1971
Texts © iBESTmag® – Images Courtesy of Girard-Perregaux – Reproduction Forbidden
