The quiet one at the table
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ·
Nobody at a dinner party has ever asked about a Girard-Perregaux on my wrist, which is precisely the appeal. This is one of the old houses of La Chaux-de-Fonds, the people behind the tourbillon with three gold bridges that turns up in every serious sale of nineteenth-century pocket watches, and yet the name still draws a blank outside the trade.
The 1966 is their plain dress round: 40 mm of steel, 9.4 mm thick, a silver dial, a date, the GP01800 automatic with 54 hours, an open caseback and 30 m of water resistance. The proportions are good and the lugs curve down the way they should.
Here is my problem with it. For about the same money (seventy-eight hundred to eighty-five hundred dollars against GP's eighty-three hundred to ninety-one hundred) the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Control Date is thinner, has a longer reserve and a stronger name, and I would probably walk out of the shop with the Jaeger. The 1966 is for the man who has already seen that Jaeger on three colleagues and would rather be left alone.