Vintage 1945

The model that gives the collection its name was born in 1945, in the immediate postwar period, at a time when the Art Déco aesthetic was giving way to a new, softer sensibility. Girard-Perregaux designed a watch with a rectangular case that was anything but rigid: the profile is curved both in length and width, following the wrist on two axes at once — a technically demanding solution, requiring the crystal and the movement's bridges to be shaped to match the same double curvature as the case, and producing a distinctive play of light on the convex surface that is impossible to achieve with a flat case. The original dial carries Arabic numerals in a distinctive period cursive, dauphine hands and railway-style minute markings, elements the collection has kept virtually unchanged to this day.

For fifty years the design remained confined to the Manufacture's archives, until, in 1995, Girard-Perregaux decided to revive it and turn it into a collection of its own, the Vintage 1945, presented explicitly as a direct tribute to that specific piece rather than as a generic "vintage-style" exercise. It is a distinction the brand claims: not a design vaguely inspired by the past, but the literal revival of a precise watch, from a precise year, kept in its own archive. The timing of the relaunch was no accident: it coincided with a renewed interest across the entire Swiss industry in mechanical watchmaking, after the decade dominated by quartz, and allowed Girard-Perregaux to reaffirm its identity as a manufacture capable of producing automatic movements entirely in-house.

Over time the collection has been enriched with increasingly elaborate complications, reaching its technical peak with the Vintage 1945 XXL Large Date and Moon Phases: a patented large-date mechanism based on two overlapping ultra-thin sapphire discs (0.10 mm thick), one for the tens and one for the units, allowing a clean, legible date display despite the curved dial's small size, paired with a moon-phase indication. The most recent executions, produced in 18-carat pink gold or steel with the in-house automatic GP03300 caliber, show how the Manufacture has managed to graft contemporary complications onto a case that, in its basic geometry, remains identical to the one designed eighty years ago.