Tokyo (SCCIJ) – Mr. Philippe Dufour from the Swiss Vallée de Joux in the canton Vaud, one of the greatest contemporary watchmakers, has been a superstar in the circles of Japanese timepiece aficionados since the late nineties. Japanese collectors bought more than half of all pieces of his commercially most successful model “Simplicity.” Dufour even appeared in a Japanese manga as the incorporation of Swiss watchmaking.
Watchmaker Philippe Dufour in his manufactory in Le Solliat, Switzerland
Comparison to samurai sword maker
The watch website Hodinkee called the 71-year-old Swiss “the greatest living watchmaker,” and Forbes magazine “the god of watches.” A catalog produced by Revolution Press Singapore for the 2007 exhibition “The Hour Glass Tempus” described Dufour a genius, the grandfather of contemporary independent watchmaking, and the enduring champion of handmade virtues. Dufour’s perfection reminds the Japanese of the master samurai sword maker Masamune, who used four million layers of folded steel to create hand-beaten swords.
Dufour works in what he calls his “smallest manufactory in Europe.” There, he creates his watches in tiny quantities, sometimes only two or three pieces a year. And he makes up to 90% of the parts himself. His trademarks are perfect masterpieces of craftsmanship. Every single part, whether visible or not, is carefully decorated and polished, all by hand, and to a perfection that is unparalleled even by the most prestigious brands, a Swiss newspaper wrote.
His most famous model, the repeater watch “Grande et Petite Sonnerie” of 1992, consisted of 420 handcrafted parts and needed 2,000 hours of assembly. Every full hour, it rings the number of hours. Every 15 minutes, it strikes the hour and the quarter(s). The user can manually silence the repetition of the hour as well as all strikings. Dufour was the first watchmaker who put such mechanisms into a wrist watch. For this achievement, the World Watch Show 1992 in Basel awarded him the gold medal for technical innovation.
Japanese collectors long for owning a Dufour “Simplicity”
Teacher of Japanese students
Other well-known models are the 1996 “Duality,” the world’s first wristwatch with two balances, and the 2000 “Simplicity,” whose beauty lies in its pure, classic clarity. He works for about one month on it and sells it for around 50,000 Swiss francs. This model has been particularly successful in Japan, where the first fan club of Dufour watches emerged in the late nineties. The “Simplicity” won the “Watch of the Year 2000” award from a major Japanese trade magazine. Since then, demand has far exceeded the supply.
Japanese collectors snapped up more than 120 of the 204 Simplicity wristwatches that Dufour made from 2000 to 2012. And the people who own his watches rarely sell them, told Yoshi Isogai, the president of the Shellman watch company, the New York Times recently. Shellman is the exclusive distributor of Dufour watches in Japan through its seven shops in Tokyo during the last two decades. Buyers waited up to six years for their timepiece.
After the first exhibition of Dufour watches in Japan, the public broadcaster NHK produced a documentary about Swiss watchmaking. The film showed Mr. Dufour working in his atelier, eating raclette with his family and walking in the forest with his dog. In due course, the Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo invited the Swiss artisan regularly to teach watchmaking skills to its graduate students. When the Japanese government in 2011 published the manga “The Secrets of Watches” for school children, it depicted a fictional Japan visit of Dufour teaching students about the history of watchmaking in Switzerland. Also, his portrait is said to be hanging on the wall at the Seiko research and development studios.
Text: Martin Fritz for SCCIJ; Photos: © dufourwatches.free.fr
