
Known for having created the most complicated watches of his era, Abraham-Louis Breguet was also the man who created the simplest watch ever made, dubbing it “souscription”. The origins of Tradition The only way a Swiss watchmaker can survive the upheaval was to move to Paris and set up his own watchmaking business. In the spring of 1795, Abraham moved to Paris and established his own company Quai de l’Horloge on the Ile de La Cité. In 1807, Abraham-Louis Breguet took on his son Louis-Antoine as his partner, renaming the firm “Breguet et Fils” or Breguet and Sons. In the last decade of the 18th century he developed new technical innovations and commercial ideas. Amid the economic and political turmoil, Abraham thrived. Louis-Antoine took over the firm upon the death of his father in 1823. From here, the company changed hands through a succession of family members and other stakeholders until 1991 when the company was acquired by the Swatch Group.




It was precisely this arrangement that enabled both conventional reading of the time and a chance to admire the movement, a possibility that Breguet regarded as highly desirable and is reflected in today’s Tradition watches. In 2005, drawing on Breguet’s early designs and archival evidence, Swatch Group’s Nicolas G Hayek and the design team were convinced that a layout where it is possible to see from a single side that can normally be viewed only by turning the watch over, would appeal to connoisseurs of mechanical watchmaking. That is how a contemporary wristwatch came to reprise the beautiful positioning of the central barrel as well as the symmetry of the gear trains and balance, all designed more than two centuries earlier by a brilliant pioneer of both techniques and design. In its first 10 years, the Tradition line has asserted itself through its powerful originality and the various models that range from hand-wound or self-winding to others with dual-time or retrograde seconds, tourbillon with fusée, independent chronograph or minute repeater functions. In each case, the effortless simultaneous view of the dial and the vital components of the timepiece proves as strongly appealing today as it did historically, especially since the grey or pink colour of the movement mainplate and bridges along with the silvered or black shade of the guilloché dial heighten the contrasts and endow these models with an amazingly modern touch.
