Girard-Perregaux has launched the Laureato Fifty collection, commemorating five decades of the Laureato, the Swiss maison’s celebrated luxury sports watch. The Laureato Fifty collection introduces four new models, including a 39mm Blue Enamel reference featuring the first in-house enamel dial ever fitted to a Laureato. For those fond of smaller watches, the new Laureato is available in a 36mm case size. The watches are powered by Girard-Perregaux’s in-house GP4800 automatic movement, visible through sapphire casebacks. Prices range from $23,100 to $24,500.
Girard-Perregaux is a brand most discover a year or two into the long, strange trip of watch obsession. GP lacks the mainstream cachet of Rolex or Audemars Piguet, but it’s one of Switzerland’s oldest watchmakers, founded in 1791 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the cradle of Swiss horology. It remains one of the few haute horlogerie houses that still designs and manufactures its movements entirely in-house. Praised for exquisite finishing paired with technical mastery, Girard-Perregaux counts the likes of Kobe Bryant, Quentin Tarantino, and Pierce Brosnan among its devotees. Its recent partnership with Aston Martin feels particularly apt: both brands unite engineering excellence with understated elegance.
Girard-Perregaux’s Dress Watches Remain My First Love
While I admire the Laureato’s blend of muscularity and refinement, I’m just not a sports watch guy. I’ll take a slim dress watch over a steel sports model from any brand. It was Girard-Perregaux’s dress watches that first seduced me. The manufacture excels at flourishes like moon phases, ornate guilloché, and heat-blued hands that shimmer like winter lightning—visual marzipan that reminds you that watchmakers are poets as much as engineers. Girard-Perregaux makes some of my favorite tonneau watches, barrel-shaped beauties reminiscent of Cartier’s Tortue but at a fraction of the price. The Girard-Perregaux 1966 collection delivers timeless elegance at a relatively accessible price point. Costing about as much as a starter home in the Midwest, the Tourbillon with Three Gold Bridges stands in the pantheon of horological masterpieces.
This opinion will raise hackles, but in the 21st century, watches are chiefly jewelry. In the digital age, they have surrendered their utilitarian purpose. Railroads no longer rely on precision watches to prevent train wrecks. Soldiers no longer synchronize assaults with hacking seconds. Even if you don’t own a smartphone, your microwave tells you the time. We covet watches for their beauty, not their usefulness. That’s why I salute brands like Girard-Perregaux. Their finest creations are miniature works of mechanical art.
