LONDON — The Naked Watchmaker website is known for its detailed educational deconstructions of timepieces, laying bare through photographs and drawings all the bits and pieces inside a watch.
Now one of those exercises has led to its first collaboration: The Naked Watchmaker X Frederique Constant Slimline Perpetual Calendar Manufacture.
Before the pandemic began, the website had deconstructed an FC-775 caliber perpetual calendar watch, a piece introduced in 2016 by the Swiss brand Frederique Constant that showed hours, minutes, moon phases, date, day, month and leap year.
The Naked Watchmaker then pitched the collaboration idea to the brand.
The people behind The Naked Watchmaker had been wanting to create their own timepiece but were stymied “because the companies we are approaching didn’t want another brand going into their workshops, so the idea was dropped,” Daniela Marin, co-founder of the website, wrote in an email. “And then we did the deconstruction of the Frederique Constant and we literally got carried away with what we would do to reveal the inner workings of the timepiece.”
Among the dozen or so changes in the new watch: The day and date dials and hands became larger; the moonphase now shows two moons; and the year hand was removed. The dial now has touches of brown for a vintage look that also helps the white lacquer numerals stand out. (And brown matches the watchband.)
The result is a 42-millimeter watch with a scratch-resistant and anti-reflective convex sapphire crystal and a see-through case back, made in a limited edition of 99 pieces, each priced at 9,995 euros ($10,427), shipping and duty included.
Peter Speake, the watchmaker and co-founder of The Naked Watchmaker, wrote in an email that the project showed “how a classical timepiece can be taken and turned into something original and entirely different from the original base through the reflection of an alternative philosophy.”
And Niels Eggerding, managing director of Frederique Constant — which has been owned by the Japanese watch brand Citizen since 2016 — said by phone that he applauded The Naked Watchmaker for educating the public through its meticulous deconstructions.
The design for this collaboration, he said, “really reveals the inner beauty of the watch.”
