Golden Ellipse

The Golden Ellipse debuted in 1968 with references 3546 and 3748, in a decade in which Swiss watchmaking was looking with growing interest at unconventional geometric shapes. The idea behind the collection, generally attributed to the brand's in-house designer Jean-Daniel Rubeli, is as simple as it was unusual for the time: to build the watch case around the golden ratio of 1 to 1.618, the number that from Euclid to Luca Pacioli — who in the Renaissance dubbed it "De Divina Proportione" — has been regarded as the ultimate canon of aesthetic harmony, applied in architecture, painting and sculpture, and which Patek Philippe transposed for the first time onto a wristwatch dial.

The result is an elongated elliptical case, free of angles and of any reference to the round or rectangular shapes then dominant, powered by ultra-thin manufacture micro-rotor calibers — initially Jaeger-LeCoultre bases such as caliber 28-255 used in the ref. 3589 (1970-1979), then fully proprietary calibers such as the celebrated 240 from the 1970s onward. To accompany the launch, the brand chose an advertising line that has gone down in watch-marketing history: "The Non-Watch", accompanied by the slogan "He who simply needs to know the time will choose a watch, not a Patek Philippe" — a statement that openly overturns the timepiece's instrumental function in favor of its purely aesthetic and symbolic value.

Among the line's most original executions is the "blue gold" dial, obtained through a vacuum-deposition technique of cobalt and 24-carat gold onto an 18-carat gold base, capable of producing a cobalt-blue coloring otherwise impossible to achieve through gold metallurgy alone. Over the decades the Golden Ellipse has also seen more compact declinations aimed at a female audience, but it is the "Jumbo" ref. 5738, introduced in 2008, that today remains the only one in current production: an almost archaeological tribute to the geometric purity of the original 1968 project, running against the current of the sports collections that in recent decades have taken over the center of the Patek Philippe catalogue.