Gérald Genta Minute Repeater, the latest watchmaking trend
At the Geneva Watch Days 2025 trade show, Gérald Genta unveiled a watch as complex as it is seductive. A tribute to the master of time from the 1980s.
There was a time when complicated watches were almost out of fashion. By the dawn of the 1980s, only the workshops of the Picasso of watches, the one who designed most of today's horological icons, were left to manufacture them. When the biggest names were no longer producing many of what are called grand complications, Gérald Genta's watchmakers were assembling dozens of them each year.
Today, times have changed. But for Geneva Watch Days 2025, the Gérald Genta house, recently relaunched by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, is paying homage to this era by unveiling a new Minute Repeater. A refined and complex collector's item, around ten of which will be produced per year, and priced at a whopping €350,000. With its onyx dial and elegant cushion-shaped yellow gold case, not quite adorned with polished gold double gadroons, it is above all an absolute elegant understatement. A true fashion statement to wear on the wrist, concealing the complexity of its movement behind its lines, its elegance, and its refinement. This is undoubtedly why it will have been so popular with watch lovers who discovered it at the Geneva show this fall. A public usually much less attracted to great watchmaking complications.
To imagine this reinterpretation of the Genta design, Matthieu Hegi, artistic director of the Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, started from scratch. He created a new form, but one that reincarnates the artistic dimension of the legacy of the genius of time, a painter and draftsman before even becoming a watch designer. As for the 40 mm yellow gold case, its thickness reduced to the strict minimum (down to 0.6 mm at its thinnest point) promotes the resonance of the sound. A simple press on the Minute Repeater trigger, and you just have to listen to the chime to know the time without even looking at the watch.
“As it’s a small watch, there was little room for improvement in sound propagation. We had to think carefully about how to optimize the sound, which is what led us to create such a thin case,” explains master watchmaker Michel Navas. Together with Enrico Barbasini, who once assembled Minute Repeaters for Gérald Genta, they designed the GG-002, a hand-wound minute repeater caliber developed entirely in-house at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton. The movement, with an 80-hour power reserve, took more than four weeks to assemble.
On this Minute Repeater, each stainless steel gong was tuned by ear and hand to optimize vibration and amplitude. Watchmakers cut and adjusted each component to ensure optimal vibration and amplitude. The gongs were then attached to the case to improve sound propagation and reverberation within. Their attachment to the case, and its thinness, amplifies sound propagation and reverberation. The result: a chime of exceptional clarity and crystallinity, with a volume perfectly suited to a wristwatch.
lefigaro
