The perfect dress watch

The perfect dress watch - or something close to perfect - is represented by the Patek Philippe Calatrava ref. 96. It is iconic and quintessentially beautiful.

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This watch was presented in 1932, and was the first of the “new” Patek Philippe.

Yes, because the company had fallen into hard times, and was acquired by the Brothers Stern, owners of Cadrans Stern, dial makers in Geneva, and also, suppliers for Patek Philippe. They relaunched the company through this “low-cost” but trendy model, tailored to fit the wrists of smart wristwatch wearers.

And it had a huge success indeed. It was designed following the Bauhaus design developed by Gropius in 1919, so it was very fashionable. It was simple to make, small (31 mm diameter), and elegant - a definitive statement of modernism, from its case design down to the typography, with the simple, clean block letters in a sans-script font, very different from the ornate design trends of the era.

From then, the Calatrava continued to be manufactured up to today, mostly unchanged, making it one of the old classics of horology, and was developed to house a plethora of different features and complications through the years, but never lost its original, distinguished charm.

You might bicker about the presence of the second hand subdial at six o’clock, which purists would judge unnecessary on an elegant watch - and a dress watch should be, by definition, elegant - but you can find some models of the 96 with the hour and minute hands only.

Movement-wise, the earliest references mounted a movement developed by LeCoultre - Patek started to manufacture movements dedicated to this model a bit later, around 1934, when it introduced the model 12”’120. However, as it happened in other cases, Patek continued to use earlier movements which it had in inventory even later.

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