“Reverso for Emergency”

A red heart lacquered across the entire case-back, made for a 2011 campaign timed to the Reverso’s 80th anniversary and the 68th Venice Film Festival, in support of Emergency’s Salam Centre for cardiac surgery in Khartoum, Sudan. Photographer Valeria Golino shot friends, colleagues, and her then-partner Riccardo Scamarcio wearing the watch with a hand over the heart for a Vanity Fair Italia portfolio titled “Il cuore è altrove” (“The Heart Is Elsewhere”) — Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Patricia Arquette, Ferzan Özpetek and Isabella Ferrari among them — before the watches appeared on the Venice red carpet. Jaeger-LeCoultre committed to funding ten cardiac operations at the Salam Centre, one for each night of the ten-night festival; the watches themselves were never for sale. Emergency’s own 2011 financial report records that Jaeger-LeCoultre later donated three examples — catalogued at Christie’s as lots 312–314, sold without reserve or premium for the charity’s benefit, one identified as a steel Grande Reverso Ultra Thin, ref. Q2788520, its back in red lacquer with the Salam Centre logo. The idea plays on the Reverso’s own origin story: a case built to protect a mechanical heart, turned instead into a message about protecting human ones.