Experience
The Most Beautiful Watch Ever Made
A long weekend in New York with a nine-month-old in tow, a watch classical on one side and unexpected on the other — and a passing joke to the CEO about a Reverso Memovox.
Reverso Tribute Nonantième · 2021
Our first Reverso had opened the door to a much deeper relationship with Jaeger-LeCoultre. We had become friends with the people at the boutique, especially Sheila, and as the world slowly began to open again after COVID, watches became part of the way we started reconnecting with people and with life outside our home.
Later in 2021, Jaeger-LeCoultre invited us to The Sound Maker exhibition in New York, a celebration of the manufacture’s long history of making watches that could be heard as well as seen: minute repeaters, chiming watches and, of course, the Memovox. That last part already meant something to us. We had started our journey with Jaeger-LeCoultre by collecting vintage Memovoxes, although our collection was still relatively modest at the time. Today, we own considerably more Memovoxes than any normal couple probably should.
But the weekend was special for another reason. Brion came with us. He was only about nine months old, and after everything we had experienced during the previous year, being able to travel together and bring our baby into this world that we loved felt wonderful. He came to the events with us, joined us on a boat trip, and somehow became part of the Jaeger-LeCoultre experience before he was even old enough to know what a watch was.
We spent a long weekend in New York, saw the exhibition, met members of the Jaeger-LeCoultre team who had come from Switzerland and were given the opportunity to handle some of the new watches before they had become widely available. There were extraordinary pieces there, including the Reverso Tribute Minute Repeater, but one watch kept pulling us back: the Reverso Tribute Nonantième. It had been created for the ninetieth anniversary of the Reverso, ninety years after the original appeared in 1931. On the front, it was everything we loved about a classical Reverso: elegant, restrained, with a date and moon-phase display. Then you turned it over to see the unexpected. Instead of another conventional dial, there was a jumping-hour display accompanied by minutes and a beautiful blue-lacquered day-and-night indication. It somehow looked modern and Art Deco at the same time.
At that point in our collecting, it was considerably more expensive than the watches we would normally have considered buying. Deni, my enabler and partner in “crime,” told me I had to have it. Even after all the watches we have seen and handled in the years since, I still come back to the same conclusion I reached when I first saw the Nonantième: for me, it may simply be the most beautiful watch ever made.
A few months later, another chapter of the story came together. Jaeger-LeCoultre invited us to Los Angeles for the opening of its new boutique in the spring of 2022, and the team managed to have the Nonantième delivered just before the trip. Once again, the three of us traveled together. Brion was now a little over a year old. Deni wore the burgundy Casa Fagliano Duoface that had started our Reverso journey, and I wore the Nonantième. By coincidence, both watches were limited to 190 pieces.
By then, something else had happened that we could never have anticipated when we first walked into the New York boutique. People we had originally met through Jaeger-LeCoultre had become genuine friends, some eventually feeling more like family. What had started with an interest in watches had grown into relationships and memories that had very little to do with buying anything. During the Los Angeles weekend, I found myself talking with Jaeger-LeCoultre’s CEO at the time, Catherine Rénier. At one point she asked me what watch I would like Jaeger-LeCoultre to make. For me, the answer was obvious: we collected Memovoxes. We loved Reversos. Why not make a Reverso Memovox? I even told her I wasn’t asking for much — they could simply name the model after me. She laughed and kindly said she would ask at the manufacture whether such a thing could be made. I told her that if Jaeger-LeCoultre could make the Nonantième, I was quite sure they could make anything.
I am still waiting for my Reverso Memovox. But I have the Nonantième. And every time I turn its case over, I still see the watch that stopped both of us in our tracks in New York, at a time when our son was nine months old and the world was finally beginning to open again. Years and many watches later, I haven’t changed my mind. For me, it is still the most beautiful watch ever made.
About Edi, Deni & Brion Shipoli
For Edi and Deni Shipoli, collecting watches has never really been about building a collection according to a plan. The watches that have stayed with them are usually the ones that became connected to something else: a place, a friendship, a journey, an achievement, the birth of their son Brion, or simply a moment in their lives that they wanted to remember. Their relationship with Jaeger-LeCoultre began with an appreciation for the brand long before they seriously began collecting Reversos — they owned vintage pieces and admired the company’s history as a watchmaker and movement maker, but the Reverso gradually became something much more personal. That story really began in 2021, when Edi and Deni traveled to New York after an extraordinary year: Deni had completed her PhD, they had lived through the uncertainty of the pandemic, and in December 2020 their son Brion had been born. They went to New York looking for a watch to commemorate his birth and came home having unexpectedly begun a relationship with Jaeger-LeCoultre. That way of looking at watches sits naturally beside Edi and Deni’s work as the creators of Watches & Politics, a project exploring horology through history, culture, diplomacy, economics, power, and the people and institutions that shape the watch world.