At SIHH 2019, Girard-Perregaux announced a unified theme for its 2019 collection, which it called “From Earth to Sky” and which was defined by the use of a very cosmic-looking combo of black titanium DLC for the cases and translucent blue for the polycrystalline dials. One of the standouts (for me, anyway) of these stellar new models hails from the most distinctively retro of the brand’s collections, the Art Deco-influenced Vintage 1945 series.
Girard-Perregaux Vintage 1945 Earth to Sky Edition
The watch, officially dubbed the Vintage 1945 Earth to Sky Edition and essentially a reworking of a 2014 model, the more conventionally named Vintage 1945 Large Date Moon Phases, is an interesting amalgamation of an early 20th-century rectangular case and dial design with definitely modern materials and aesthetics. Like its predecessor, it hosts a rare combination of an oversize date display, in a single rectangular window at 12 o’clock, and a moon-phase indicator, overlapped by a small seconds hand, in a circular aperture at 6 o’clock. The Earth to Sky Edition also repeats the original model’s “smoked” tinted sapphire crystal providing an elegantly shrouded view of the mechanisms inside, including the gears, wheels, and disks that drive the two featured complications. Here, or course, the smoked effect is in blue rather than the original gray. The dial is made of translucent blue sapphire.
The big date display utilizes two disks, one o...