Alain Silberstein, an interior architect and artist turned watch designer, is one of the original pioneers of independent watch brands and champions of mechanical watches. His eponymous brand launched in the mid-1980s, in the midst of the quartz crisis, focusing on a bold, genre-defying designs and mechanical movements. With a signature look inspired by the Bauhaus, abstract art, and contemporary design/architecture movements, Alain Silberstein’s watches truly stood out in an industry that was turning ever more traditional. His brand closed down in 2012 after a solid run.
In 2019, Louis Erard teamed up with Alain Silberstein on their first collaboration watches, bringing the designer’s bold vision to a new generation of collectors. The regulator design featured bold shapes and primary colors, both common elements in Silberstein’s work, for a result that is part pop art, part haute horology. In 2021, they teamed up again for a new line with similar dial concepts but with a truly novel 40mm all-titanium case design featuring a matte cylinder that appears to float within polished brackets.
Louis Erard and Alain Silberstein utilized this format again for their most recent collaboration, this time adding a tourbillon caliber. Patented by Abraham Louis Breguet in 1801, a tourbillon places the escapement within a rotating cage to balance the effects of gravity on a watch’s timekeeping. Highly complicated to manufacture and assemble, tourbillons became a hallmark of high-end watchmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Manufactured by Olivier Mory exclusively for Louis Erard, the BCP T02 caliber is hand-wound, and features 19 jewels, a one-minute tourbillon (makes a full rotation in 60 seconds), regulator layout, 100 hours of power reserve, and a frequency of 21,600 bph. The tourbillon is visible from the front side of the movement, acting as the seconds hand, while the remainder of the movement, elegantly decorated with circular cote de Geneve, is visible through the display window. Limited to only 78 pieces, the Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Tourbillon is a unique combination of high-end watchmaking and artistic vision.
