Mickaël Gaspar is twenty-nine, and his first wristwatch has been ten years in the making. The Souscription N° 1 puts its movement on the dial side, under a domed sapphire crystal, with a retrograde date riding across the top of the dial, and it was revealed today at IAMWATCH in Singapore.
He drew the mechanism at watchmaking school in Morteau, between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, then spent a decade building grand complications for other houses while his own design waited in a drawer. His classmates persuaded him to sign the dial. He did.
Nothing hidden under the dome
The balance, the pallet lever and the retrograde date all sit on the dial side, magnified by a domed sapphire crystal that works the way a watchmaker’s loupe does. The date hand travels its arc one step a day, and at midnight on the last day of the month it flies back to the first in a single jump, corrected through the crown and impossible to miss.
The dial itself is hand-sandblasted and rose-gold plated, with Super-LumiNova on the numerals, the chapter ring and the hands. The hands are black-polished and curved by hand, the piece number is engraved on the left of the dial, and the signature sits at three o’clock where a signature belongs.
Everything is on show.
Two hundred and fifty hours, most of them with a file in hand
The movement is hand-wound, built on a modified Swiss base plate and gear train around the retrograde mechanism Gaspar designed as a student. It runs twenty-six jewels at 18,000 vibrations per hour with 46 hours of power reserve, its Breguet overcoil formed and pinned by hand, its balance wheel made and balanced in the atelier, its staffs and pinions turned on a traditional lathe.
Turn the watch over and the gear train runs under hand-sandblasted bridges, bevelled with mirror-polished edges and inward angles. Nine components are black-polished by hand, two of the bridges and the hands among them, and the case is water resistant to 3 bar, tested on every piece before the watch is regulated and released.
“Ever since I was a small boy I wanted to be a watchmaker. I never had a plan B. Since I chose to show the mechanics, I wanted every detail to be worth looking at.”
Mickaël Gaspar
Twenty pieces, subscribed the old way
The name comes from the oldest custom in the craft, the souscription by which Breguet financed his watches two centuries ago: collectors subscribe first, and the watchmaker builds against their commitment. Twenty pieces will be made, each numbered on the dial, each delivered in a wooden box carrying a marquetry scene of the Doubs valley, on a hand-stitched calf leather strap with a steel pin buckle.
Ateliers Associés, the Swiss incubator founded by William Massena and Louis Westphalen-Lemaitre, carries the imagery, the press and the collector relationships. Requests are reviewed by Gaspar and the incubator together.
The résumé earns the hearing. Gaspar is the great-grandson of a watchmaker who spent forty years at Lip, a silver medallist at the Meilleurs Apprentis de France, with time at Breitling and four years at Sellita behind him, and a partnership at MH Horlogerie in Les Brenets, where he developed and repaired grand complications for other houses, flying tourbillons, fusée-and-chain movements and minute repeaters among them.
CHF 69,000 before tax is roughly $82,800 at the current ECB reference rate, serious money for a first watch from a maker most collectors met this morning. Buy one if you collect independent watchmaking at the source and your request survives the review, because twenty pieces is twenty pieces. Skip it if your money follows established names with waiting lists of their own, since the Souscription asks for faith in a bench rather than a brand.
