Today is the official opening of the London-based watch show, Salon QP. First one to shoot is Schwarz Etienne , which unveils some new versions of its fascinating La Chaux-de-fonds Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde — one steel with blue Lapis Lazuli stone dial edition and one white gold with blue Opal stone dial. Luxurious dials, nice finishing and complex movement… Overview!
While the brand still remains quite low key, the Schwarz Etienne La Chaux-de-fonds Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde is a watch that some of you might have seen before, as our own Xavier presented it to you on Monochrome recently. As a reminder, the story of Schwarz Etienne goes as far back as when Paul Arthur Schwarz and his wife Olga Etienne founded a fabrique in La Chaux de Fonds, combining their two surnames.
Paul Schwarz Etienne, and then later his descendants, eventually owning brands such as Alpha and Venus. Schwarz Etienne was also involved in manufacturing activities for prominent clients such as Dunhill and Chanel. In the mids a businessman, Raffaello Radicchi, invested in reviving this century-old heritage and in , Schwarz Etienne put into action a plan to develop and produce movements in-house. The idea was to develop a modular family of calibres, always with the same fitting calibre, even with the adjunction of additional functions.
This led to the introduction of the MSE Manual Schwarz Etienne calibre in , followed by the introduction of several new watches, including this, the Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde. And indeed, it is quite a complex timepiece, which underlines the versatility of the original construction of its base movement. Unlike the dozens of watches that many of us would love to wear with the down side up, just to be able to contemplate the movement more than the indication of the time, the Tourbillon PSR is just that and displays the time in a truly mechanical environment.
In fact, the entire movement is reversed. All of the usual elements found on the caseback side are here presented as part the dial. As you can see on the images, the Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde exposes its movement on the dial side, although not as on a skeleton watch, but in a more traditional way, with elements visible between the bridges.
