Harry Winston has a track record of working with world-famous watchmakers such as Greubel Forsey and Jean-Marc Wiederrecht on each year's Opus watch, so this year's collaborator comes as a surprise. Opus 12 is the brainchild of the low-profile French watchmaker Emmanuel Bouchet, who co-founded the watchmaking company Centagora in 2008.
'All the 12 watchmakers for the Opus line have around 30 years of experience, which means Harry Winston has benefited from 360 years of fine watchmaking,' says Harry Winston's president and CEO, Frederic de Narp. 'We want all Opus watches to reinvent the way of telling time. The thing we don't want is to put the watchmakers in a box, so we don't give them guidance for creating the Opus watch. They need the freedom of creativity.'
The timepiece Bouchet created reveals thinking outside the box.
'Bouchet came to us two years ago with this crazy idea inspired by the Copernican Revolution,' says de Narp, who explains how Bouchet developed Opus 12 with Harry Winston and the designer Augustin Nussbaum. 'The Opus 12 is an artwork that required 7,500 hours of work. It is a very complicated way of telling time.'
According to the Copernican Revolution, the earth rotates around the sun and also, around itself. As opposed to telling time with a pair of hands at the centre of the dial, an Opus 12 wearer can see 12 pairs of hands located around the periphery of the watch pointing towards the centre. This rotating double-hand system displays time every five minutes and every hour - every five minutes, the minute-hands are animated and the 12-hour hands are animated each hour. Contained in a 46mm polished 18ct white gold case, the Opus 12 features a mechanical, manually-wound movement that offers a power reserve of 45 hours.
Like the Opus 12, the new Premier Feathers line is also an exercise in craftsmanship and marks 'the first time Harry Winston put together the marquetry of feathers with diamonds for our watches', de Narp says.