"If you think about it," says Christian Selmoni, director of product marketing at Vacheron Constantin, "great watches are more about ideas and design than the intricacies of their movements." He is speaking of the
Vacheron Constantin Quai de l’le (877.862.7555, www.vacheron-constantin.com), which represents one of the 254-year-old company’s most dramatic bursts of creativity to date. The timepiece, which ranges in price from $29,000 to $53,550, breaks ground in several areas, but most notably in its anticounterfeiting technology. The proliferation of sophisticated knockoffs led Vacheron Constantin to hire Roger Pfund, a Swiss security expert, to participate in the design of the Quai de l’Ile. Pfund applied a combination of intaglio printing that cannot be copied, secret inks, and microtext to a film just beneath the transparent dial. The watch is available with either a day-date or an automatic date movement; clients can customize the day-date model somewhat by choosing different combinations of rose gold, titanium, and palladium for the watch’s modular case.
