The previous year Vacheron Constantin had one of the best watches celebrating the Year of the Ox, and now the watchmaker is back again for the Year of the Tiger.
Vacheron Constantin are the first to reveal their Lunar New Year watches and they have done so with somewhat of a bang and a whimper simultaneously. How is that possible? Well, if you compare it to last year’s ox watch, you’ll see that the designs are essentially the same. Just replace the ox with a tiger. A slightly dumpy looking tiger.
The watch still looks great, but it does feel a bit of a lesser watch due to its closeness to last year’s model. The ox design is also superior to this new tiger design, which is a shame because, to put it simply, tigers are cool. The issue may stem from the tiger’s face being forward facing which when looked at from different angles can look slightly off.
If the year of the ox variant wasn’t so good, this new year of the tiger watch would be better off. It seems that Vacheron Constantin in this scenario are suffering from success.
Following the same model as last year, we get two versions of the watch, one in platinum with a blue dial, and one in 18ct 5N pink gold with a bronze-tone dial. Both watches are powered by Vacheron’s own automatic Calibre 2640 G4 which allows the watch to display jumping hour, minute, day and date using four little apertures on the dial.
The process by which they created the dial is still as impressive and creative as it was before. The gold dials are hand-engraved and decorated with Grand Feu enamel inspired by the ancient art of papercutting called Jianzhi. This is still impressive and slightly different to the Ox edition, using what looks like palm fronds for inspiration rather than regular leaves.
Only 12 of each version will be made and are available via Vacheron Constantin boutiques for roughly $140,000 USD.
In other watch related news, Seiko have released U.S. exclusive Prospex Turtles to help save the turtles.