These New His-and-Hers Moon Phase Watches from Parmigiani Redefine the Couple’s Watch
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Among the watchmaking cognoscenti, the Parmigiani name evokes three things: vintage watch restoration, finely crafted contemporary timepieces and the Swiss village of Fleurier, home to founder Michel Parmigiani and his well-regarded manufacturing facility.
All three factors helped set the stage for the brand’s elegant new take on its Tonda 1950 Lune timepiece, expressed in his-and-her models bearing a lunar calendar complication that runs on an ultra-thin self-winding movement.
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Redesigned with a new dial layout, both Tonda 1950 Lune models come in 39 mm rose gold cases, but that’s where the aesthetic similarities end. The gentlemanly style with the slate-colored dial contains a lunar display showing the northern and southern hemispheres at 10 o’clock, a date display at 3 o’clock and a small seconds window at 6 o’clock. It retails for $26,900.
The second model, which retails for $34,400 and made its debut at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, also contains a moon display at 10 o’clock, but the date window falls at the 4 o’clock position. More importantly, it features a mother-of-pearl dial and a diamond-set bezel (totalling nearly 2 carats’ worth of gems) that lend the piece an unmistakable femininity.
Beneath their varied exteriors, the models contain mechanisms that, at a thickness of 9.6 mm, represent a feat of watchmaking not easy to achieve— complete with decorative Côtes de Genève finishing, naturally.
“The new Tonda 1950 Lune watches offer a very strong proposition for those looking for a timepiece that combines the beauty of traditional watchmaking expertise with a contemporary design,” says Gustavo Calzadilla, managing director of Parmigiani Fleurier. “We wanted the layout of the dial to be cleaner and better balanced, which is why we moved the moon phase complication to the 10 o’clock position and the date window to 4 o’clock.”
He added: “In 2019 the Tonda Collection has evolved in key categories to provide sporty alternative such as with the Tondagraph chronograph, but it has also been enhanced with an elegant new presentation of the moon phase with a variety of new Tonda 1950 Lune models in steel and gold cases and much-improved introduction of the diamond-set pieces where we are now using larger diamonds on the bezel, almost 2 carats, which play wonderfully against the mother-of-pearl dials.”
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