New Trends in Complicated Ladies Watches

New Trends in Complicated Ladies Watches

Martin Green
By Martin Green April 12, 2017

The time that quartz movements where the staple in women’s watches is slowly passing. Over the last couple of years, the demand for mechanical ladies watches has grown significantly. With mechanical watches on the rise, also comes more interest in the more complicated movements.

Bulgari LVCEA Tourbillon
Bulgari LVCEA Tourbillon

It might be a bit early to call this a full-blown trend, but when we look at the newly introduced ladies watches we do see that more and more of them house complicated movements. What is most interesting to note is that they differ quite a bit from complicated men’s watches. Where men can be easily swayed by the complication alone, women want the entire package.

This means that the watch not only houses a complicated movement but is housed in an elaborate case, often with a gemstone setting. Even the dial has to be something special, and some brands even apply additional decoration techniques on the movement itself.

Breguet Tradition Dame
Breguet Tradition Dame

The result are watches that are very interesting from various perspectives. First of all, they bring together a wide variety of different artistic disciplines. All their individual crafts give much more depth to the concept of the watch. A good example of this is the Graff MasterGraff Floral Tourbillon. The mechanical complication of this watch is surrounded by mother-of-pearl and stunning enamel flowers.

Graff MasterGraff Floral Tourbillon
Graff MasterGraff Floral Tourbillon

Bulgari gives the tourbillon slightly more room on the center stage of the LVCEA Tourbillon but surrounds it by a precious dial made of jade and set with diamond hour markers. Interesting to note is also that both the Graff as well as the Bulgari have a diameter of 38mm.

Blancpain Villeret Quantième à Phase de Lune
Blancpain Villeret Quantième à Phase de Lune

Breguet is of course known for the Reine de Naples when comes to ladies watches, but the new Tradition Dame shows that mechanical excellence and feminine elegance can go perfectly together. Compared to the men’s model you see once more a focus on the details, such as the diamond setting on the case, the mother of pearl dial and the engraved mainspring barrel. This sense of elegance can also be found in the Blancpain Villeret Quantième à Phase de Lune, where a manufacture movement with a silicon balance spring sets the pace for a classical moon phase watch. The moon even features a feminine face, surrounded by an opaline dial set with eight diamond hour markers.

With these trends in ladies watches, it will be interesting to see if the men’s watches will follow suit with them as well, and will get a stronger focus on every aspect of the watch, rather than to focus just on the technical aspects of it.