Claude Bernard Retrograde Day-Date

One of the pervading horological interests is the idea that great quality watches don’t always have to equate to great amounts of money. When we're talking about watches that spawl the intersections of quality, value and price – Claude Bernard always come up as one of the options.

Design

The Claude Bernard Retrodate Day-Date is a simple funtional watch; with a polished case, lancette hands and applied polished indices, subsidiary seconds at six with a big date display and a retrograde day indicator at twelve. It's purely functional and nothing fancy. Like so many truly simple things, it’s a very hard thing to get right.

The appeal and value of functional driven designs is one well understood in the world of watches. Some of the most iconic and enduring designs; watches like the Omega Speedmaster and the Rolex Submariner are products of an utter prioritization of function in the design process. The same is true with the Claude Bernard Retrograde Day-Date. It is a watch where the design is absolutely focused clearly on telling the time, day and date with as little fuss as possible.

Dial

The dial is stark, with polished lancette hands, a subsidiary seconds dial with a big date display at 6, 12 applied hour indices, an outer minute chapter and a rare retrograde day indicator.

The hour and minute hands are just the right length in proportion to the hour indices, the minute hand extends slightly beyond the minute marker and the hour hand doesn’t quite reach – a very small detail that assists the legibility of the dial.

Another nice touch is that the printed minute markers only mark the 4 minutes between the 5-minute intervals – again greatly adding to the overall clean aesthetics of the dial.

The sub-dial also has a subtle guilloché finish, adding some nice texture to the otherwise monotonous dial. In it contains a big date display that allows a much larger view of the date and is significantly more legible than a traditional date window without the use of a cyclops.