Women’s Watch Wednesday – Hands-On with the Parmigiani Fleurier Kalparisma
Just over 20 years old now, the eponymous brand Parmigiani Fleurier, founded by Michel Parmigiani in 1996, is known for its classic and elegant watches with hand crafted movements made in-house in the brand’s Fleurier workshops – and a certain twist in the design, quite Italian. Initially creating men’s watches – with one of his first wristwatch introductions being the tonneau-shaped Kalpa – Parmigiani unveiled the women’s Kalparisma line in 2009 as a gentler take on time.
It’s not too hard to appreciate how thin 5.15mm is in abstract terms – it’s a shade thicker than two 20 cent pieces, FYI – and pictures of the Octo Finissimo Automatic get you a little further along the path to understanding. But short of actually having the watch in your hand or on your wrist, the best way of contextualising just how incredibly slim this watch is is through the medium of video. Luckily, we’ve put this short video review together so you can get a sense of how it wears in glorious HD. The only thing we can’t convey? The way this watch manages to feel as light as a feather and solid as a rock at the same time.
Here at Time+Tide we tend to focus on the simpler end of Cartier’s offerings, classic beauties like the Tank or the Drive Extra Flat. But there’s another side to the famous jewellery maison’s watch offerings that’s, well, exceptionally complex. The Rotonde de Cartier Minute Repeater Mysterious Double Tourbillon is one such watch. If you didn’t glean that fact from the impressively wordy model name, take one look at this skeletonised, 45mm monster and you’ll immediately realise that we’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill Tank. No, this watch, or – more accurately – the Calibre 9407MC inside, is one of the most confident expressions of Cartier’s horological ability we’ve seen in some time, with 448 individual parts, finished to a level sufficient to earn it the Geneva Seal, and a particularly demanding package of complications. The most visible is the ‘mysterious’ double tourbillon, which sees the whirring 60-second tourbillon rotate around the transparent sapphire aperture every five minutes. On its own this mysterious display, something of a trademark for the brand, would be impressive enough, but Cartier is determined to impress your ears as well as your eyes, as they’ve also managed to fit a minute repeater into a movement that’s…
The Rolex Cellini range could be described as ‘the Rolex you wear when you don’t want to (be seen to) wear a Rolex’. It is bereft of practically all of the Rolex design codes that make their watches among the easiest in the game to spot at 20 paces. There is no iconic Oyster or Jubilee bracelet to give it away – the Cellini has so far only been released on leather bands – and nor is there a brazenly fluted bezel in glittering precious metal to seal the deal. While the latter forms a part of the watch, it is toned down and offset by a domed bezel. Thanks to its tapered lugs, this Date version, like the Cellini Time, offers one of the thinnest Rolex profiles in the whole catalogue, though its diminutive wrist weight and heft is well and truly compensated for by the machine-engraved guilloché dial which is quite the showstopper in the metal. This model is also one of very few Rolex models in their history to feature an off-centre date dial. The overall effect is of a restrained elegance that simply doesn’t demand that you know its name, or who it’s related to. That’s not to say the Cellini can’t be…