Horological social media throws up some strange sights, but few stranger than what turned up on the Instagram feed of vintage–Patek Philippe dealer John Reardon toward the end of summer.
Reardon is a Patek fanatic, but then you would need to be to own the Ref. 3770/1. Few people know what it is; fewer still have the nerve to wear it. Colloquially known as the Nautellipse, it is essentially the forced marriage of two classic Patek Philippe timepieces: the Golden Ellipse of 1968, a sleek, elegant dress watch, and 1976’s Nautilus, the all-conquering steel sports watch. I have been trying to think of a suitable automotive analogy, and the best I could come up with was a mash-up of a Lincoln Town Car and a Lincoln Navigator and call it something like the “Towigator.”
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, and where Reardon saw rare beauty, I saw something that should never have been allowed to happen. But I am probably in the minority, largely because the Nautellipse was touched by the hand of watch designer Gérald Genta, who designed the Nautilus. (The Golden Ellipse was the work of Patek Philippe’s in-house designer Jean-Daniel Rubeli.) Reardon’s Web site proudly offers for sale one of Genta’s preparatory gouaches for the Nautellipse.
When Genta died, in 2011, his name was known and respected in the industry. But it is posthumously that his reputation in the world of watches has soared, earning him an almost Taylor Swift–like level of fame.
Until 1972, Gérald Genta was a respected “stylist” in the Swiss watch industry, which meant that he worked sub rosa creating designs and selling them to watch brands. It was in 1972 that Audemars Piguet launched the Genta-designed Royal Oak. Today, it would be called disruptive; back in the 70s, it looked like it had come from another planet.
The watch was conceived as an aesthetic whole: it was uncertain where the octagonal watch case ended and the complex brushed-and-polished steel bracelet began. The pricing was equally revolutionary; although made of steel, it would cost more than most gold watches. It was a watch of a type not seen before, a luxury steel sports watch. In modern marketing jargon it was a “segmenting” product, dividing opinion. Skeptics predicted that the Royal Oak would bankrupt Audemars Piguet, but the exact opposite turned out to be true. Audemars Piguet is now essentially a mono-model brand with revenues of $2.7 billion, thanks in very great part to Genta’s octagonal masterpiece.
The 70s were a golden decade for Gérald Genta: there was the launch of IWC’s Ingenieur and Patek Philippe’s Nautilus, both of which he designed. Genta went on to set up his own watch company and launched his eponymous brand.
When the Nautilus celebrated its 40th birthday, in 2016, there was a renewal of interest in sports-luxe steel watches, and by the start of 2022 the “basic” steel Nautilus was trading at six times its retail value, if you were lucky enough to get hold of one. Anecdotally, I even heard of fractional ownership: people buying a quarter of a Nautilus, much as they might buy the leg of a racehorse. The Royal Oak experienced similar rapid appreciation.
Such was the rabid hunger for the Nautilus and the Royal Oak that anything that looked vaguely similar or had comparable design features was seized upon. I remember telling one brand boss that the design of his new, integrated steel luxury sports watch was so similar to the Royal Oak that he ought to think of naming it the Imperial Elm. For a while, it was a tide that raised all boats, and arguably one of Genta’s greatest legacies is the existence of an entire product sector of integrated-case-and-bracelet-design sports-luxe watches.
Like all bubble markets, the steel sports-luxe watch boom ended with a sharp correction in prices, but culturally its work had been done. The Nautilus sent every watch nerd burrowing down into the rabbit hole of the Internet to find out more about Genta, and every watch brand ransacking its back catalogue for something, anything, that might enable invocation of the master’s name.
I even heard of fractional ownership: people buying a quarter of a Nautilus, much as they might buy the leg of a racehorse.
IWC’s big launch last year was a revival of the Ingenieur. Seiko’s big watch this year is a reboot of its 1979 Genta-designed Locomotive, not forensically re-creating the original watch but rebuilding it using Genta’s initial drawings and removing the slight compromises that had been made back in 1979, creating a situation in which the remake is more original than, well, the original. I am sure some horologically inclined philosopher has already called this the Genta paradox.
Anything the man designed became a cult. A watch called the Polerouter, made in the 1950s for pilots of Scandinavian Airlines by Universal Genève (a currently dormant brand soon to be relaunched), was dragged from obscurity, hoisted upon the metaphorical shoulders of 2020s watch lovers, and loudly cheered because it was discovered that Genta had designed it. Had it been the work of someone else, the Polerouter would have remained what it is: a nice, unassuming round watch.
In the past, watch companies did not have creative directors. Even a designer as great as Genta seldom got credit for his endeavors, and watch companies tended to keep quiet about external designers. In the subsequent confusion over authorship, overzealous fans have credited Genta with designs that were the work of other people. For some time there was a rumor that he had designed the recently revived Vacheron Constantin 222, a late-70s riposte to the Nautilus and the Royal Oak, that was in reality designed by Jorg Hysek. There is even a constituency that believes Genta designed the Rolex King Midas, although the Rolex archives have not so much as a sketch on the back of a cigarette packet suggesting that was the case.
Brands once coy about mentioning the work of a talented external designer are now eager for a sprinkling of Genta’s magic dust. Not long ago I was called out for suggesting that Gérald Genta had actually designed the Bulgari Bulgari for Gianni Bulgari. I was assured that this was a fallacy. But earlier this year, when Bulgari relaunched the Bulgari Bulgari, the press release announced that “its unique alchemy, envisioned by Gianni Bulgari, took form on the sketch pad of legendary designer Gérald Genta.” It is a masterful, almost lawyerly, form of words that jumps, skirts, and dances around the origin story of one of the most significant watches of the late 20th century, managing to invoke both Gianni and Gérald.
But this was not the first time that Bulgari and Genta have been linked. The Gérald Genta brand became part of Bulgari, and, having done very little with the name since it acquired the Italian jeweler in 2011, last year LVMH, or more specifically the Arnault clan’s youngest scion, 26-year-old Jean, announced the resurrection of the Genta brand. Its first collection debuted this summer.
But even geniuses have off days, so while I am happy that John Reardon unearthed the Nautellipse, I am also happy that Patek Philippe is unlikely to be reviving it anytime soon.
Nicholas Foulkes, the author of more than 20 books on the arts and history, is a London-based writer and editor
