On Roger Dubuis’s Instagram page, there is a man clad in a dark, elegant suit standing on a tower hundreds of feet above the urban landscape of a metropolis, unencumbered by any form of safety equipment. The message couldn’t be clearer: Roger Dubuis watches are for the individualists and daredevils — a breed of hyper-sybarites who can be found riding their motorcycles across the Moroccan desert en route to dinner at Al Mounia, BASE jumping off the Italian Alps, or even attending ayahuasca ceremonies in Mykonos surrounded by perfectly suntanned supermodels. Accordingly, when you look at a Roger Dubuis watch today, an example of a vision that they call “Hyper Horology”, it would be easy to consider it purely the type of ultra-extroverted, larger-than-life, neon-lit — literally, for the Excalibur Twofold actually features a luminous light signature — horological pyrotechnics whose primary purpose is to celebrate life in the moment with a carpe diem / memento mori vigour. But for me, what is important to understand is that Roger Dubuis’s rebellious creativity has its roots deeply and inextricably linked with the ambition of the brand’s founder — to create real technically authentic watches expressed in a way that always has them blazing an inexorable path into the future.
Nicola Andreatta, the dynamic CEO of the brand, says, “People forget that Roger was still alive when the brand began shifting gears towards the vision we have for Hyper Horology, and that he loved it. He says it is the natural evolution to the technical creativity and aesthetic audacity that are at the roots of the brand.”
“Roger was always about doing something executed at the very highest level, but completely differently,” says Gregory Bruttin, who is the product strategy director at Roger Dubuis, but also acts as the living memory keeper of the brand, having worked with the watchmaker from the very beginning in 1995. “This was his motivation behind the world’s first double retrograde perpetual calendar, the case design of the Sympathie, the first world’s first in-line instantaneous perpetual calendar, our first skeletonised flying tourbillon, and our double tourbillon with differential.”
“He would look at the watches we are creating today, such as the Excalibur Diabolus in Machina, which plays what in Latin they refer to as the “devil in the music” chord for the quarters, with a fully skeletonised movement, a dial that looks like an exploding star, and a case made of Cobalt Chrome Micro-Melt, which is not only super hard and has a beautiful, stealthy lustre, but also ideal sonic qualities — and I know he would very much approve,” says Andreatta. “He would have loved that
