Out of This World - Vanguart's Watches and the Horology of Other Dimensions.

Time, for most, is linear - a sequence of ticking seconds, neatly rationed into days and deadlines. But Vanguart approaches time differently. To them, time is sculptural, emotional, and multidimensional - a force to be shaped rather than followed. In their hands, a watch becomes less a tool of measurement than a talisman of perception.

At the Geneva Beau Rivage showcase, held April 1-5, Vanguart revealed new additions to its cosmic horological narrative. These were not mere watches. They were instruments from another realm - or perhaps from a future that has quietly folded itself into the present.

Constellations of Craft - The Genesis of Vanguart

Founded in 2017 and launched publicly in 2021, Vanguart emerged not with a whisper but with a gravitational pull. Its founders - a convergence of APRP engineers, Girard-Perregaux veterans, and avant-garde designers - did not set out to iterate on tradition. They sought to reroute it entirely, to shift the very coordinates of contemporary haute horlogerie.

The inaugural creation, the Black Hole Tourbillon, transcended the traditional confines of horology—more akin to an interdimensional portal than a mere timepiece, it invited the wearer into a gravitational ballet of engineering and imagination. It did not simply tell the time - it drew time inward, into a vortex of curvilinear rings and levitating mechanics. This was horology imagined through the lens of astrophysics and science fiction - a technical marvel that was also an existential object.

Every angle of the Black Hole Tourbillon defies orthodoxy. The joystick control, replacing the traditional crown, invites interaction more akin to piloting a craft than setting the hour. The case, devoid of visible screws, evokes the seamless exterior of a spacecraft - aerodynamic, immaculate, enigmatic.

Mechanics of Emotion - Time in Motion

At the heart of the Black Hole lies a mechanical choreography of over 750 components, each one hand-finished and silently harmonised. But to reduce this to a list of specifications is to miss the point. Vanguart does not simply build watches - it composes experiences.

Consider the vertical power reserve, reminiscent of a retro-futurist fuel gauge. Or the levitating tourbillon, suspended like a suspended heartbeat. These are elements designed not merely to function, but to provoke - to elicit awe, like watching a solar eclipse or a satellite crossing the night sky.

In Vanguart’s philosophy, engineering is not at odds with emotion. Precision and poetics are two sides of the same coin - or perhaps two hands of the same clock, always circling one another.

The Orb - A New Celestial Chapter

In 2024, Vanguart extended its celestial narrative with the introduction of the Orb — a timepiece that relinquishes overt spectacle in favour of refined stillness, embodying a more meditative expression of mechanical elegance.Where the Black Hole is theatrical, the Orb is contemplative. Its design draws from the symmetry of celestial bodies, its silhouette echoing the balanced spin of planets in slow, eternal drift.

The Orb’s centrepiece is a rotating mass - diamond-set and orbital - which shifts elegantly between manual and automatic modes. When engaged, it glides along a sloped titanium track, like a moon tracing its path around an invisible axis. When stilled, it rests with quiet authority, its stillness imbued with latent energy.

Inside the slim 10.5 mm case, a flying tourbillon levitates within an architectural landscape of openworked bridges and exposed mechanisms. It is a mechanical diorama - a tiny theatre of time, performing continuously beneath a sapphire canopy.

Metaphors in Motion - The Art of Horological Allegory

What separates Vanguart from its contemporaries is not merely complexity or daring aesthetics. It is its capacity to weave metaphors into mechanics. Each design decision is loaded with allegorical resonance. The joystick is not just a novel interface - it is an invitation to navigate time. The floating mass is not mere spectacle - it is a meditation on balance, inertia, and choice.

These timepieces function as wearable myths - relics from an imagined civilisation where time is understood not as linear progression, but as spatial sculpture. They offer the wearer more than accuracy - they offer an altered state of temporal awareness.

Vanguart, in this sense, is not part of the horological establishment. It orbits it. Its creations do not chase heritage - they invent it. They do not compete with tradition - they operate in an alternate frame of reference, one where time bends, reflects, and reconfigures itself through design.

Toward the Event Horizon - The Future as Material

To wear a Vanguart is to inhabit an idea - a notion that time is not a constraint but a medium. These are not legacy pieces in the traditional sense. They are vectors - instruments for those moving not through time, but with it.

Where others chase permanence, Vanguart embraces motion. Where others reference the past, Vanguart charts the unknown. Its watches are not answers - they are questions in physical form.

What if time could levitate? What if a watch could orbit its own centre? What if we no longer marked the passage of hours, but participated in it?

Vanguart does not offer closure. It offers possibility - beautifully finished, conceptually charged, and mechanically alive.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Vanguart.