Style Edit: Vacheron Constantin’s new Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin models
The Swiss watchmaker is famed for its complications and for the slimness of its timepieces – these 2 new models being a mere 8.1mm thick
Perpetual calendars are among the trickiest of horological complications to engineer. The reason: our logic-defying calendar. With the months varying in length, and a leap year coming along to throw a spanner in the works every four years, it’s fiendishly challenging for a mechanical movement to reliably keep up, navigating all that calendrical complexity to update itself accurately over years, decades and even centuries.
Backed by 270 years of watchmaking experience, Vacheron Constantin has long been a master of perpetual calendars – the venerable Swiss maison created its first such timepiece as long ago as the 1880s. It really moved the dial, though, with the introduction in 2016 of the Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin. It was a daringly slimline evolution of a collection that had first seen the light of day two decades before, characterised by a sporty yet smart aesthetic, with a powerful nod to Vacheron Constantin’s Maltese cross emblem in the form of its trademark notched bezel.
For 2025, that iconic model has been reinvented with a pair of fetching new dials. One comes in pink gold with a matching golden dial, while the other is in white gold, complemented by a burgundy lacquer dial.
The former has a blue minutes track around the edge of the dial, contrasting nicely with the rest of the watch with its all-over satin-finished pink gold colour that extends to the moonphase display at 6 o’clock. On the latter, the burgundy dial similarly has a burgundy moonphase display, alongside white numerals and indexes.
The moonphase and perpetual calendar are made possible by the self-winding manufacture calibre 1120 QP/1. A masterpiece of miniaturisation, it is just 4.05mm thick, allowing the new 41.5mm cases to be a svelte 8.1mm thick. The perpetual calendar that the movement powers is also highly sophisticated and profoundly accurate – next needing manual correction in 2100, and then only in similarly round-numbered non-leap years.
Both versions of the new Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin come with beautiful integrated gold bracelets. However, those bracelets can easily be interchanged for one of the two additional straps supplied – in blue or white for the pink gold version, and in burgundy or white with its white gold sibling. It adds a flexibility that only boosts the elegant, sporty appeal of these most visually appealing of new additions to the Vacheron Constantin line-up.