There is an expression that comes over Laurent Ferrier’s august visage that I love. This happens when he picks up one of his own watches and gazes at it lovingly. It is akin to what I imagine Proust’s face looked like when he tasted the famous madeleine in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and a torrent of memories come flooding back into his mind. Similarly, I imagine when Ferrier holds one of his wonderful watch cases in his hands, he senses how the edges feel like a river stone, worn smooth by the passing of water over it; he looks at the perfect, restrained design language, punctuated with just a touch of exhilaration injected by his signature Assegai hands modeled after the spears of an African warrior tribe; and when he gazes at the simultaneously vibrant yet subdued signature color palette, you know that he is experiencing a flood of memories that stretches back almost a half century.
If you look at the
