Girard-Perregaux 1966 watches

The Girard-Perregaux 1966 is the brand's slim, round dress watch, and its name points to a landmark in Girard-Perregaux's chronometry. In 1965 the company developed the Gyromatic HF, a high-frequency mechanical movement whose balance beat at 36,000 vibrations per hour. It made its debut at the 1966 Basel Fair and went on to win the Centenary Prize of the Neuchâtel Observatory.

The modern collection is built to ignore fashion: ultra-thin cases, plain round dials, leaf-shaped hands and slender tapered batons. The simpler models measure roughly 8.5 to 10 mm thick, and even the Chronograph stays a little over 11 mm.

At 30 and 36 mm the 1966 turns into a jewellery watch, in steel or pink gold, many of them set with diamonds and some with mother-of-pearl or pink dials. From 38 mm up it is the plain dress watch the line is known for, in steel, pink gold or white gold. The complications come in 40 and 41 mm gold cases: the Chronograph and the Full Calendar, both introduced in 2012, the Annual Calendar with Equation of Time, the Dual Time, the Big Date Moon and the Small Seconds Date.

The Chamber of Wonders trio, shown at Baselworld 2015, puts antique world maps on the dial of a 40 mm pink gold 1966 with the slim self-winding calibre 3300, each limited to 18 pieces. The Pearl of Wonders reproduces Ibn al-Wardi's atlas with the Arabian Peninsula at its centre, on a thin slice of sodalite whose blue forms the oceans, with the detail painted on pieces of papyrus. The Terrestrial Map paints the East Asian part of the world map Matteo Ricci drew for the Wanli Emperor in India ink on white jade. The New World, or Novus Orbis, rebuilds the map of the 16th-century German cartographer Sebastian Münster in tiny pieces of semiprecious stone, from aventurine to nephrite.