There was a time when it was very frowned upon for a woman to keep an eye on the time. And much more that he consulted her. She was extremely rude. But those protocol rules that are so out of place today did not diminish women's interest in the most special and complicated watches.
For this they had an essential collaborator, Vacheron Constantin, the oldest manufacturer in the world that since its founding in 1755 has focused on complications (functions that go beyond strictly indicating hours and minutes) and high craftsmanship, but also on the demands of female clientele. The manufacture supported and increased their interest by designing from day one (and that was more than 260 years ago) high, very high watchmaking pieces also for them and inventing secret watches for those occasions when it was out of place to wear a regular watch. .
Diving into the Vacheron Constantin archives confirms that impulse. The bicentennial papers of the manufacture reveal that, at the beginning of the 18th century, a series of unique models were specially commissioned not for but by women.
With a first historical reference dating back to 1815, a yellow gold pocket watch with the case delicately decorated with an engraved floral motif enhanced with garnets, the house gave early signs of its obsession with satisfying time in a feminine key and adapting to their changes in activities, needs, tastes and tendencies.
That obsession that has perpetuated over the last two and a half centuries is reflected in the Vacheron Constantin Heritage collections, made up of more than 1,300 pieces, where the house's miniature calibers stand out (in collaboration with Verger, it even made tiny watches inserted in a small box or even on a button) and watches that respond to the current craze for the art deco aesthetics of the 1920s.
The shapes of watches began to demand more and more miniaturized calibers and Vacheron Constantin became a true expert to the point of offering in 1915 an incredibly small movement with which it made history. It is the 7-line baguette (21.5 x 6.5 mm), which was mainly used for jewelry watches. The elongated and curved profiles that fit perfectly to the wrist, since then became distinctive features of the house's aesthetics, as well as the new shapes that were reflected in the secret watches when they became radically fashionable.
Check the time without being seen. Just by lifting or rotating the lid that covers the dial of your jewelery watch. Pure luxury. And then the other way around, looking for maximum provocation with the groundbreaking and also superceative designs that arrived in the seventies. The story continues. And women still like it.
