Temps de lecture : < 1 minute
October 28, 2009. Vacheron Constantin is awarded the Watch of the Year prize, conceived more than 15 years ago by the two co-founders of Montres Passion magazine, Kenan Tegin and Joël A. Grandjean. The model awarded Historiques American 1921, shows an asymmetry facilitating the reading of the time and borrowed from the history of the brand.
Seductive design effect
An American customer, during the Roaring Twenties, would have expressed the wish to see the time in a more logical way, i.e. in the axis of the eyes. Thus, the 12 of the dial and the push-button had been shifted to 13:00. A kind of daring non-conformism, an off-centering that gives this model, even in its 2009 version, a vintage appeal. Apparently, this American customer was not only at Vacheron Constantin, since on eBay, a Cyma model, whose estimated dating could well date back to the same period (1920s) displays a similar design. Were there already model deposits at that time? If so, who has the right of precedence? We’ll have to dig a bit… What if this design was just a way to recycle a pocket watch into a wristwatch? Call for historians, please…
✍ Joel A. GrandjeanChief editor & publisher of the online watch magazine "Swiss Watch Passport® (by JSH®)" and of the Swiss watch journal JSH® (founded in 1876). Member of Impressum, PressTourim and Club Suisse de la Presse, this Ivory Coast-born Swiss, descendant of a family of watchmakers, co-founded the magazines Montres Passion & Uhren Welt at Ringier in 1993 with Kenan Tegin, as well as the Prix Montre de l'Année. Founded in 2005, his press agency TàG Press +41 contributes to some twenty media. These include Journal Suisse d'Horlogerie (2008-2014), Heure Suisse/Schweiz and Année Horlogère, F/D/E (2011-2014), Watchonista.com (2013-2019). In 2019, he founded and chaired "JSH Archives & Patrimoine" to relaunch the Swiss watchmaking journal JSH. Then in 2021, he built on his very first editorial venture, the "bloghorloger.ch" founded in 2003, to come back online with the Swiss Watch Passport® (by JSH®). Joël A. Grandjean is a member of the SSC, the Swiss Society of Chronometry, and of the jury of the Prix Gaïa, aka the "Nobel of watchmaking" awarded since 1992 by the MIH, Le Musée International de l'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
