Parmigiani Fleurier celebrates its founder with a special – edition Toric .
PARMIGIANI FLEURIER LAST DECEMBER CELEBRATED THE 70TH BIRTHDAY of its founder , watchmaker Michel Parmigiani , with a seventy-piece limited edition steel Toric Heritage watch in honor of the first watch he designed .
The new watch ’ s blue dial is decorated with eye-catching , radiating Grain d ’ Orge guilloché , a pattern also found on the gold rotor . Inside , the in-house COSC-certified Caliber PF441 features two barrels and seven hand-beveled bridges .
As is standard with Parmigiani Fleurier , the movement within the 42.8mm steel-cased watch is finished to haute horlogerie standards , with Côtes de Genève stripes , circular graining , spiral-wound and circular-graining on the plates alone . The watch ’ s solid 22-karat rose gold rotor , visible through the clear sapphire caseback , features the same Grain d ’ Orge guilloché engraving seen on the dial .
THE FOUNDER The company chose to echo its founder ’ s first watch in large part because the Toric design ( which was updated in 2017 ) reflects Michel Parmigiani ’ s own history and interests .
Michel Parmigiani was born in the Swiss canton of Neuchatel and grew up with a devotion to both watchmaking and architecture . He has described the Toric case as a design inspire by the famed Fibonacci mathematical sequence and by the Golden Ratio that has inspired thousands of years of art and architecture .
According to Parmigiani , every aspect of the Toric ’ s design starts with the Golden Ratio , including the relationship between the hands , the fluted angles in the crown , the length-to-width ratios , the rate of curvature of the lugs as they taper away from the case , even the caseback design and placement of the sapphire crystal .
80 | INTERNATIONAL WATCH | FALL 2021