Jlc

24: Classics

The1931 patent drawings for the Reverso give precise details of the mechanism.

Thankfully, the aesthetics have been refined over the past eight decades.

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Jaeger-LeCoultre’s

2011 celebrates the 80th anniversary of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso. The first models were sold back in 1931, borne out of the need to create a watch that was capable of surviving a rough game of polo, and since then the design has become a symbol of elegance and simplicity and the hallmark of the Swiss luxury brand. James Gurney

Reversos through the decades (left to right): Reverso 60ème; Reverso Réserve de Marche; Reverso Grande Automatique AcCuir; Reverso Grande Taille; Grande Reverso; Grande Reverso Lady Ultra Thin.

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Legend states that in 1931, the Reverso was created after a polo-playing, British officer in the colonial army, irritated by yet another broken timepiece, challenged Swiss watch businessman César de Trey to invent a watch solid enough to survive a polo match.

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s The generally universal acclaim accorded to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso 80th Anniversary collection by visitors to the SIHH is not without its irony since the Le Sentier manufacture’s current pre-eminence among the grand maisons of the watch industry is largely due to proving wrong those who doubted that the company could sell anything but a Reverso in any worthwhile numbers. The headline launches for JaegerLeCoultre over the past five years have been dominated by designs as varied as the Gyrotourbillon, Amvox, Compressor Diving and the Duomètre. Yet the Reverso remains Jaeger-LeCoultre’s undoubted icon – if you could have just one Jaeger, you would have to think quite hard before considering anything else.

How the Reverso came to be so indelibly associated with Jaeger is not entirely clear, the Reverso’s conception involving, apparently, a Swiss denture-magnate and a French industrial designer as well as Jacques-David LeCoultre. Disentangling the threads, it seems that there was a poloplaying officer in India whose broken watch inspired César de Trey to develop a selfprotecting watch. De Trey knew LeCoultre who, in turn, commissioned René-Alfred Chauvot of Jaeger SA to engineer a solution.

Other answers to the problem of protecting a watch’s glass were already around – Cartier’s Tank Basculante had existed in

Reverso advertising from the 1930s and 1940s.

embryonic form at least as early as 1926 – and who quite had the idea to make the swivelling case that identifies the Reverso is not clear. Wristwatches being so new, there were numerous companies trying to meet the challenge of making robust, wearable watches that could take the same everyday blows as an active human’s wrist, this being the era of Rolex and Panerai as well as of the Reverso and the Tank.

Making an icon The waters are muddied further still by the idea being licensed out to other manufacturers (including Patek Philippe and Movado) even before the patent for the reversing case was applied for and it was only some time later that the patent was bought into a company set up by JacquesDavid LeCoultre to market the idea. The truth is that the idea on its own was not the making of a future icon. The illustrations submitted to the patent office are, in design terms, charmless – can you imagine a Reverso with cathedral hands?

What makes the Reverso an icon is its faultless design, as pure an expression of the streamline and the geometric progressive classicism of the La Société des Artistes Décorateurs whose ideas so dominated after the 1925 Paris Exposition, as you could hope for. If ‘art deco’ was not a universally understood term at the time,

the energy and concern for boldness and simplicity very definitely were – it is no leap of the imagination to see the Reverso as definitively of the same decade as the SS Normandie, the Mallard or the Supermarine seaplanes.

The Reverso à éclipse models include a unique feature activated via a wheel at the 2 o’clock position.

Every time the wheel is turned, the dial opens to reveal an enamel painting – some more risqué than others.

An example of the decorative potential of the Reverso caseback.

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That the Reverso should be so of the period is hardly surprising given the unprecedented strength of Art Deco – regardless of the terminology used, it’s hard to overstate the impact of the 1926 Exposition, particularly as the designs and styles were widely disseminated and commentated on through a flood of new catalogues, magazines and books in a way that design had not been before. Added to the dominance of Art Deco concerns, wristwatch design was barely a decade old in any meaningful sense and was particularly well-placed to absorb the new design language of the time.

Perfect proportions By the early 1930s even the simplified echoes of Art Nouveau’s preference for organic and natural shapes was giving way to a more architectural, machineage classicism, which, in practice, meant strongly geometric patterns and forms based on the use of well-known ratios such as the ‘golden section’. The Reverso’s proportions are determined by this ratio, as is quite easily apparent when you view the watch side on. More striking is the effect of the horizontal bands – known technically as ‘gadroon’ according to Jaeger-LeCoultre – that overlay the basic rectangle of the case.

The Reverso’s credentials as an Art Deco icon are underlined by the success of the design in the 1930s and, perhaps more so, by the Reverso’s near disappearance after the Second World War. Up until the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, Jaeger-LeCoultre, as the company had become, introduced 11 different movements for the Reverso, while the watch was seen on celebrated wrists ranging from Amelia Earhart to Edward VIII (both of whose watches also demonstrated the decorative potential of the Reverso caseback).

That the Reverso should have suffered such a sharp decline in favour is surprising from the vantage point of 2011, since the watch can be imagined fitting quite easily into the style and tastes of the post-war decades – the Reverso looks entirely natural on Mad Men character, Don Draper’s wrist. It’s hard to see the Reverso fitting so well into 1970s’ style but it is still a surprise to learn that it was only once customer demand was impossible to ignore in the 1980s that the Reverso was more than a peripheral presence in Jaeger-LeCoultre’s catalogue.

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Intended to be a bridge between past and present, Jaeger-LeCoultre has created two Grande Reverso Ultra Thin Tribute to 1931 pieces in steel and pink gold, featuring a black or white dial with dagger-shaped hands and baton-type hour-markers directly inspired by the original Reverso.

The irony is that, since its reintroduction, the Reverso has been so successful as to almost completely overshadow anything else made in Le Sentier, hence those retailers muttering that Jaeger would never sell anything else. If the Reverso does not quite dominate the perception of JaegerLeCoultre any more, the design is undoubtedly a major component in the company’s public image.

As for the collection shown at Geneva, anyone familiar with Jaeger-LeCoultre in recent years will not be surprised that the execution and conception of the watches is almost faultless – the sort of near perfection that you only notice afterwards. That may sound a little breathless, but looking at the detail, I think it would be hard to say otherwise. Just possibly the new collection is a little antiseptic, a little too perfect to love, though I suspect a year or two of wear and tear would solve that. One area where Jaeger is curiously and persistently maladroit is in naming its watches, the lead watch of the collection rejoicing under the title ‘Grande Reverso Ultra Thin Tribute to 1931’ – where to start: Odd capitalisation? Sheer unwieldiness?

The Tribute to 1931 comes in two forms, a whitedialed, rose gold and steel with black dial, both of which are based on the ultra-slim (2.94mm high) hand wound calibre 822. Both designs simply say Reverso on the dial, a nice touch and all the more laudable given the pressure to logo everything.

One other point to make – the designs essentially speak for themselves – is that the black dial version has Superluminova indices tinted slightly yellow to match the fading of the original Radium paint.

Reverso

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21st-century

The Grande Reverso Ultra Thin features an exceptional slender case and represents the ultimate expression of horological classicism inspired by the original model.

Also based on the calibre 822 is a more standard, contemporary Ultra Thin, which Jaeger highlights as having a new guilloché pattern designed to create a stronger contrast. I would want one if it were not for the Tribute watches. Much more enticing is the beautiful enamel dialled Grande Reverso with its red hour markers on the minute track and raised logos.

Reverso Répétition Minutes à Rideau is a minute repeater driven by a louvre shutter covering the dial, that upon being slid back activates the repeater mechanism which in turn sounds the given time counting hours, quarter hours and minutes by the sound of two gongs.

Two other watches complete the collection, a Grande Reverso Duo, which is a reworking of the GMT watch that Jaeger-LeCoultre first launched in 1994. Less obviously notable in the light of the Tribute watches, the Duo is one for the Jaeger cognoscenti as its movement is all that a modern Jaeger should be – cleverly engineered, easy to use and unobtrusively excellent. The last watch in the collection is the Reverso Répétition Minutes à Rideau, a watch that in any other circumstances would be gathering all the headlines.

Following on from the Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque, the Rideau is a minute repeater of exceptional sophistication, full of the technical refinements that Jaeger-LeCoultre has become famous for. The trebuchet hammers that first appeared in the Hybris Mecchanica Grande Sonnerie are matched to square profiled gongs that allow a more effective strike and better tone, all of which can be seen or concealed beneath a shutter mechanism (which also activates the repeater).

Anyone remotely interested in watches will have heard all they wanted and more about the Reverso by the end of this year, but the Reverso deserves it being one of the few watches that should be present in one form or another in any watch collection.

Further information: www.jaeger-lecoultre.com

The Grande Reverso Duo displays the time in two time zones on two different dial designs fitted back to back thanks to a unique construction concept created by the manufacture.