For any watch aficionado worth the name, Gerald Genta is a known quantity. He’s the designer behind some of the most legendary timepieces ever built, enough that anything with a 70s, industrial flavour can be (and usually is) called Genta-esque. And yet, while Bulgari may have recently revived his name, it’s not actually Gerald Genta on the dial that’s continuing his legacy, but Gerald Charles. As evidenced by the new Maestro GC39 25th Anniversary limited edition jumping hours.
You’ll have seen Gerald Charles on Oracle Time before; we’ve been covering the haute horology brand for a while now, with their funky, stepped cases and idiosyncratic 6 o’clock smile. And while there’s certainly a lot to love in the Maestro collection on its own merits, the fact that it’s the brainchild of the most famous watch designer in history lends some real gravitas – especially as it was an endeavour of creative necessity.
“My father, Franco, first met Gerald Genta at an exhibition in Italy, where Genta asked him to help launch his eponymous brand in the country.” The frustratingly young Federico Zivian has been CEO of Gerald Charles since 2018, but as he reminded me, his family has been intertwined with Genta’s legacy since the early 1980s. “It was a success and the two remained friends, so after he sold the Gerald Genta brand to Bulgari 1999, he came to my father saying, “Franco, we’re friends, can you help me?”
You see, Gerald Genta was a prolific watch designer. Without the ability to create, to design watches to develop new ideas, shapes and horological developments, he was adrift. He couldn’t live with the idea that he couldn’t design watches anymore. As to why he sold his own brand to Bulgari in the first place, who knows? You can be sure though that whatever the reason, it had a fair few 0s at the end. Either way, Bulgari gave him one lifeline: he could start a new brand under his two first names, Gerald Charles.
For anyone that’s come across Genta’s name solely off the back of his era-defining work in the 70s – the Patek Philippe Nautilus, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak – then Gerald Charles might seem a bit of an outlier when it comes to the great designer’s work. It’s worth nothing though that those were commissions, they were ideas for other brands, not for himself.
Under his own name, watches like the Octagonal, Retrograde and his incredibly successful Disney collection were worlds away from the harsh, industrial planes that turned his name into an adjective. So, when he launched the Maestro in 2005, it wasn’t a watch that most people would call ‘Genta-esque’, but it very much encapsulated the designer’s outlook on watches.
“The design language of Genta is very much visible in Gerald Charles,” explains Federico, “which always took inspiration from objects in real life. It’s what allowed him to create new watches, not copy what came before. In our case, it was baroque Italian architecture, with that curved construction and two-step case. It’s quite, let’s say heavy, visually but harmonious, too.”
So, what’s next for Gerald Charles as a brand? The soft relaunch since Federico took over in 2019 has been going well, enough that you might expect them to have already jumped right into their archives for another round, post-Maestro. Unfortunately, Genta’s approach doesn’t really lend itself to that way of thinking. His models were all dramatically different and in limited quantities, enough that they’re rarities even among serious collectors. In fact, the only chance you’ll have to ever see most of them is at Gerald Charles’ newly christened museum in Geneva. As Federico puts it:
“Genta wasn’t really building a brand”, explains Federico. “It was a free flow of ideas and led to some very particular watches. So, while we have these amazing archives, we need to focus and build up the Maestro.”
Which takes us smoothly to the Maestro GC39 25th Anniversary limited edition jumping hours. As a brief look into those archives will show you, Genta was a fan of the complication, which is one that’s surprisingly tough to pull off. It’s not just a case of having a window rather than a hand, the energy release of an instantaneous switch from 11 to 12 is brutal on the delicacy of a watch movement. Hell, when Patek Philippe popped an instantaneous date into the new Cubitus, they needed to reengineer the whole movement. Needless to say, the GC39 movement inside is doing some heavy lifting.
That however isn’t entirely new, seeing as it was previously used in Gerald Charles’ insane collaboration with Ducati. But the presentation here couldn’t be more different. The full wheel isn’t on show for one, with only a panoramic window at 12 o’clock, an inverse of the 6 o’clock smile. More than that though, there’s the dial, which is a mix of blue grained lapis lazuli and guilloché. But not just any guilloché: meta-guilloché.
This isn’t some kind of Silicon Valley virtual finishing; instead, it’s from the actual root word meta. First, you have your standard guilloché, already an artisan technique, with a fine, light pattern engraved into the metal. Then, it’s given a protective coating, which then receives a second round of engraving, before the rest of the coating it removed. The result is an incredible double layer of guilloché that picks out a baroque-style star around the lapis portion of the dial. It’s almost holographic and even our superbly captured images can’t do it justice.
The dial is by far the first thing you’ll notice about the watch but the second is its size. Where the standard Maestro is more rectangular, the GC39 is squared, meaning its 42mm x 42mm proportions sits large on the wrist. On the one hand, it gives the ornate dial and stepped bezel more room to breathe. Fortunately, the case is also made from titanium so while it looks sizeable, it doesn’t feel it.
Perhaps the most important thing to say however is that the GC39 25th anniversary edition feels like a Gerald Genta watch. Not, I hasten to add, the ultra-faceted pieces most new watch industry inductees come across, but the genuine, artistic, flamboyantly creative side of his work. In that way perhaps more than any other, Gerald Charles is the continuation of legacy that dates back much, much further than the last 25 years. And nothing says that better than the man himself, from the 2005 Gerald Charles catalogue:
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the attention you paid to my new brand Gerald Charles. I created each of these timepieces with passion. As always since the beginning of my career, I have sought to combine technology and aesthetics. I searched for the ideal shape and used colours like a painter uses his painting to present you with a timepiece that will give you a sense of pleasure each time your eyes are drawn to it. If I succeeded in transmitting this passion in what you have just seen, then I am a happy artist who will continue on my creative path with ever-increasing energy.”
Price and Specs:
More details at Gerald Charles.
A bit too fussy for my liking, and of course, too expensive.
What are they thinking of by adding a rubber strap onto what is wholly a dress watch.