“We corals are like your most beautiful memories: dangerously exposed to existential pollution, to the vicissitudes of life, we struggle to survive!” With an orange background, an historic Swiss watch brand is rescuing the corals.
By Albert-J. de Buttes-LaCôte / TàG Press +41 (News Agency)
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Will the most beautiful memories remain as orange as the most intense sunsets? Please note, if they are fragile and deep as a day ending on the Caribbean Sea, we should never let them die…
Corals as memories
Memories? To prevent them from fading away, from crumbling. And the more daily life gets in the way, the more new emotions try to overshadow them, the more it is necessary to do everything possible to save them, eventually, to transplant them into the clear and healthy waters of another future full of promises. “It is the same for my existence” whispers to me this coral that I met underwater, on the outskirts of an island where paradise seemed to have set up its headquarters, not far from a preserved ground that should have remained my homeland, my place of anchorage, my ultimate root. Fragile, the coral barriers crystallize the forgotten memories and resist to the memorial erasures.
The open eyes filled with wonder and desire to live, I examined this graceful form under my mask with all the strength of my curiosity. He or she would stand out, filling my view with an undulating ballet. He or she seemed to smile at me, even wanting to wrap his or her eyelashes around my wrist. I was wearing a Milus dive watch, the 2021 resurgence of the Archimède, a mythical model with vintage luster sprinkled with contemporaneity. An Archimèdes with an orange lacquered dial, a real tool watch waterproof to 300 meters, assembled however at my request on an elegant Venetian mesh bracelet with unsuspected flexibility.
It was #21 of a limited edition of 50. 21 as a fetish date, as the incomplete number of hours of a blessed day.
A committed watch, a watch that rescues
The meaning of this watch, sober with its 41 millimeters diameter and its arrow hand, seemed to bring a breath of brightness and brilliance to my little underwater creature between animal and vegetable morphs. And for me a breath of oxygen, protected by a helium valve discreetly appearing on the side of the case middle at 9 o’clock. Fluid, agile, he or she waved his or her ramifications towards me, as if to thank me. Little by little, moving around, I finally gave it a feminine identity. But it was especially because its presence full of life and colors pushed me without mercy in a still alive memory, arousing strange resonances with a still open pain. A feminine pain, that of a sorrow, of a breathlessness, of a lack of air. One of these still burning pains able to transform existence’s salts into indescribable burns.
“The fact that there are human beings somewhere who care about my condition, it restores my hope,” she suddenly blew me out of my musings, pointing to her fellow creatures around. She was talking about Coral Guardian, this non-profit organization that captures those of her kind in order to carefully replant them in more peaceful areas in order to save them. She also mentioned this summer campaign full of hope and concreteness, launched by Luc Tissot, great watch captain and owner of the historical brand Milus founded in 1919: purchasing a Milus Archimèdes Orange Coral allows you, with a certificate, to give your name to a coral and to organize its survival by transplanting it.
A legend comes back to life
Milus is proposing to combine the useful with the enjoyable by adopting a coral: acquiring a piece from this numbered series of the Archimèdes, characterized by their bright orange and their direct relationship with the mythical history of the Archimèdes model. A piece of iconic history made possible by the appearance in the 1950s of a watch case designed and patented by the Ervin Piquerez factory (EPSA). A case with an innovative system, that of becoming more and more waterproof as the watch sinks into the depths. From this legendary case, always appreciated by the collectors around the world, the Milus brand had created in 1960 the Archimèdes 666 model and then, ten years later, the Super Compressor.
“Thank you for having rescued me” the mysterious underwater being suddenly said to me. Was she then aware that she was the one who had given me back the taste for sparkles, while a flutter of palm brought me back to the top?
So I did not give her my name. I gave her the name of the one who continues to live in my heart, beyond the existential pollutions and toxicities of the passing time…
Like a coral decor made immortal as much as the memory of happy days… of days to come? Like an unexpected fame, that of a promising nomination to the GPHG, the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
