By my count there have been at least six Girard-Perregaux x Aston Martin collaboration watches to date but they are far from finished. The most recent collab was the iridescent green Laureato Chronograph, which is a model they’ve explored a few times together in different colours and materials. However, one model they’ve never teamed up for is the Laureato Skeleton. Which is about to change with the launch of the Girard-Perregaux Laureato Skeleton Aston Martin in an 88-piece limited edition.
The formula for Girard-Perregaux’s Aston Martin watches is relatively simple: take one of your popular watches and make it green. That’s basically what they’ve done for 90% of their collaboration watches, the exception being the F1 Edition that actually contained pieces of a real F1 car. With this release they’re sticking firmly to the formula and who can blame them when they evidently sell well as they keep producing more and more of them.
For this limited edition the base model is the Laureato Skeleton Ceramic with its 42mm black ceramic case and integrated ceramic bracelet all with a fine brushed finishing. It wouldn’t be an Aston Martin edition without some racing green though so where the standard Laureato Skeleton Ceramic has rose gold coloured hands and markers on its dial, the Laureato Skeleton Aston Martin has green ones. It makes for a much darker overall vibe, more serious and sportier.
Plus, as a skeleton model it’s like taking a peek under the hood of a sports car, revealing the powerful engine at its heart. Theres the fuel tank (power barrel) between 5 and 6 o’clock and the firing pistons (balance wheel) at 12. I’m running out of car engine puns for the running seconds counter at 10 o’clock – though as it’s always running when it’s on, if it’s anything like my car it’s presumably the equivalent of the check engine warning light.
I do find it a little frustrating that all this special edition amounts to is some re-coloured accents. At least on the previous openworked collaborations like the Three-Bridges they made the effort to engrave the Aston Martin name into some of the components. But there’s nothing like that here. What I find particularly tricky about this situation though is that as a design it also does just work as it is, and if they did do more it might be too much. So, I’m caught between not wanting to reward lazy design but also is it actually lazy if it’s just economical?
Plus on a technical level it’s just as solid as always with the GP01800-2627 automatic movement. It has a 54-hour and 4 Hz frequency. The rotor, which is normally pink gold, is PVD coated green like the accents on the dial and there is at least an Aston Martin logo on the sapphire glass.
As noted in the introduction the Girard-Perregaux Laureato Skeleton Aston Martin is limited to 88 pieces with a price around the £45,000 mark based on the price of the standard Laureato Skeleton Ceramic.
Price and Specs:
More details at Girard-Perregaux.
Don’t get me wrong, I like cars and I like watches, but, what I don’t get is a watch that is directly linked to a car company, what is the point of that, to me, it looks like a giveaway for buying the car, but that is obviously not the case. I do get (to some extent), links to a design input by car designers, eg, an earlier watch that had design input by Porsche, but it wasn’t branded as Porsche. Take for instance, the old GP brand that had the Ferrari logo on the dial, what was that all about other than to try to impress people that (possibly) you owned a Ferrari, more likely you actually owned a Ford. If you need to do that, I’m afraid this reeks of being “shallow”, so this new release is not working for me.
It is a nice watch, but all wouldn’t pay £46,200. My maximum price I will pay for watch is £200 or £600