Following on from Vacheron Constantin’s grand 270th anniversary celebrations, which were celebrated in both Paris and Geneva, 2025 gains another lustrous sheen of novelties from the world’s oldest watch manufacture in continuous operation. Thanks to its Les Cabinotiers department—responsible for fulfilling the frequently complicated and almost always outlandish bespoke requests from VIP collectors—the many thousands of hours by its watchmakers and artisans have yielded a bumper crop of horology befitting its milestone year.
And before the curtains close on 2025, this watchmaker unveils its top-secret La Quête single-piece edition projects: a quest to explore and master time across its many forms, from astronomical observations—which were the very origin of time measurement—to inspired mythology and legendary epics that symbolise achievement and conquest for posterity. As Vacheron Constantin’s style and heritage director Christian Selmoni observes: “Each creation by Les Cabinotiers expresses an innovative, inventive, and singular vision of the world of watchmaking.”
LES CABINOTIERS COSMICA DUO—GRAND COMPLICATION
Utilising an ingenious reversibility system, this single-piece edition showcases two universes in one supreme execution of artistic crafts and high watchmaking. Inside the 47mm case (20.2mm in height), one finds a tribute to the universe through a sky chart (only 0.25mm thick) with time, month, day, date, and local and home time indications. On the reverse is the skeletonised Calibre 2756-B1, with indications of day and night, moon phase, sunrise, and sunset. In total, 1,003 components power 24 complications, including a tourbillon regulator and a minute repeater.
LES CABINOTIERS HOMAGE TO EPIC WARRIORS MINUTE REPEATER
The four characters featured on this quartet of ultra-thin minute repeater timepieces were chosen, as Selmoni explains, for demonstrating heroism. “This human trait transcends cultures and these four great warriors succeeded in a great quest that was particular to him alone.” The choice of chiming watches as the accompanying complication lay in its technical challenge, and greatly rewarding accomplishment, as well as the historical perspective of victories announced through the chiming of bells and sounding of trumpets. The four—Alexander the Great, Antar of pre-Islamic Arabia, Genghis Khan, and Sasaki Moritsuna, a samurai and military commander in medieval Japan—are depicted by miniature painting techniques on Grand Feu enamel within 41mm cases of yellow gold.
LES CABINOTIERS ARMILLARY TOURBILLON—MYTH OF THE PLEIADES
This timepiece tells the story of the daughters of Atlas, the Titan from Greek mythology, punished by Zeus to hold up the heavens for all eternity. In total, 450 hours of engraving, micro sculpture, and surface treatment were needed on the 45mm pink gold case, bringing forth Orion the hunter, as well as the ship Argo, dolphins, chimaeras, and sea monsters from Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. The choice of the Pleiades myth recalls mankind’s early observation of the stars, the cycle of seasons, and day and night phenomena, leading to fantastical stories of how the stars got into place. Thus, the seven Pleiades—daughters of Atlas and the Oceanid nymph Pleione, who were granted immortality with Zeus transforming them into a constellation—are protected from the hunter Orion by Taurus, the celestial bull. Its Calibre 1990 is marked by four patents for technical innovations, with the most visible being the architecture of its tourbillon cages, rotating to form a Maltese cross every 15 seconds.
LES CABINOTIERS CELESTIA ASTRONOMICAL GRAND COMPLICATION HOMAGE TO PTOLEMY AND COPERNICUS
Two unique pieces of the Celestia Astronomical Grand Complication pay tribute to great astronomers of human civilisation. The first, Ptolemy, lived in second-century Alexandria and posited Earth as the centre of the universe. Nearly 1,400 years later, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus would advance the heliocentric theory, taking the world into a new understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Each timepiece is decorated to illustrate the respective astronomer’s system, with nearly six years’ worth of production to develop these two pieces, a process made more difficult by the irregular distance of planetary ellipses. In the case of the 45mm white gold Homage to Ptolemy, hand-engraved planets orbit the Earth represented by the crown, with champlevé engraving techniques depicting the planetary ellipses. As for the 45mm pink gold Homage to Copernicus, the crown becomes a symbol of the Sun, with planets engraved in relief.
LES CABINOTIERS THE LABOURS OF HERACLES
Of the 12 famed labours of the Greco-Roman demi-god Heracles (Hercules when adopted into Roman mythology), four have been selected by Vacheron Constantin’s Les Cabinotiers department to be depicted in miniature painting on Grand Feu enamel, with the protagonist as a white gold micro sculpture. Two plates of white gold allow for the miniature-painted background to overlap a reproduction of a 17th-century map of Greece. The four labours of Heracles that are shown within the 40mm white gold cases are destroying the Nemean Lion, killing the Lernean Hydra, ridding the town of Stymphalos of man-eating birds, and capturing the Cretan Bull. Sandrine Donguy, Vacheron Constantin’s marketing and innovation director, points out that Les Cabinotiers’ tendency to include subtle details in their pieces is seen on the lower sector of the dial, which displays the ancient map of Greece. “This time, they (the artisans) wanted to bring forward the location where the task happens. For each piece, on a sector of the dial, a tiny (0.4mm diameter) gold cabochon in 18k represents the precise location.”
LES CABINOTIERS GRAND COMPLICATION HIGH JEWELLERY—MOON DUST
This high jewellery timepiece makes a poetic interpretation of a journey from Earth to the Moon, with three separate artistic crafts—engraving, gem-setting, and guilloche—playing a part on a 47mm white gold case. On it, one finds 185 baguette-cut diamonds, totalling 8.68 carats, and 165 brilliant-cut diamonds. The case middle and lugs shine with the illumination of snow-set diamonds, giving the timepiece its name. Just as impressive are the complications found within: tourbillon, minute repeater, calendar, and astronomical functions, including an equation of time. On the reverse side, real time is told through the constellations. On either side of the case, the representations of the solar system are brought forth by the engraver’s skills, with a view of sunrays shining through clouds towards Earth on the side of the crown, while the opposite side of the case offers a view of planets as seen from the lunar surface.
