Not a Genta, and better for admitting it
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ·
A dealer once told me, in the tone of someone confessing to a minor crime, that he had sold a 1975 Laureato to a client as 'more or less a Genta'. It was not, and he knew it, and the client knew it too and bought it anyway. That is the Laureato's whole history in miniature: born in 1975, three years after the Royal Oak and a year before the Nautilus, forever introduced at parties as somebody else's cousin.
Girard-Perregaux brought it back properly in 2017, and the modern version is a good deal better than the comparison suggests. The octagonal bezel sits on a round case rather than being the case, which gives it a softer outline than the Audemars, and the Clous de Paris dial in blue catches the light nicely. The GP01800 gives you 54 hours, the open back shows it off, and 100 m is entirely sufficient for an integrated-bracelet watch that will see more terraces than oceans.
Where I hesitate is size. At 42 mm with 24 mm between the lugs the bracelet is very broad at the shoulder, and at 10.9 mm it is not quite slim enough to carry that width elegantly. On a wrist like mine it reads large. The smaller sizes in the collection are the ones I would choose.
At fourteen and a half to sixteen thousand dollars, though, it is the integrated-bracelet watch you can buy this afternoon without a purchase history, a waiting list or a lecture. For a lot of people that alone settles it.