Les Matinaux

Trilobe tells time with concentric circles

With Les Matinaux, Trilobe, a young French-Swiss watchmaking company founded in 2018, is taking it upon itself to revolutionize the way we tell time. Indeed, this luxury watch simply makes the hands disappear, in favor of three concentric circles that rotate to point to three indexes: the outer circle indicates the hours, the middle one the minutes and the smallest the seconds. Not only is the arrangement of the circles novel, but the attention to detail is obvious with indexes in the shape of a trilobe. This design, which is the brand's logo, is reminiscent of architectural cloverleaf ornaments as they have been used for over twenty centuries. The inner circle of the Les Matinaux watch also refers to architecture, as the openwork wheel revealing part of the movement draws the western rose window of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The movement, precisely, is also exclusive, thanks to the X-Centric module that comes here to be grafted onto a Swiss automatic movement ETA2892: it allows the animation of the three off-center circles. Original design, architectural inspiration, horological innovation, the Les Matinaux watch is also - and perhaps first and foremost - a homage to René Char and the collection of poems so titled. "A work that takes the opposite view of the world we live in, a poetry that combines refinement and simplicity, an invitation to dare": for Trilobe, "René Char marks out a road of hope and daring".

Les Matinaux, colorful variations in steel and rose gold

The spirit and audacity of the Les Matinaux watch thus perfectly combine with the innovation of the newcomer to luxury watchmaking. It is not, in fact, a watch, but actually the collection, with its more or less colorful declinations in steel 316L or rose gold. The silver, blue, green, carmine or grey sunray versions, with their matching velvet calfskin strap, have been designed with case sizes of 38.5 or 40.4 mm. These are the "basic" versions, with a new price of 8300€. Trilobe goes further with Les Matinaux rose gold and grey sunburst, or rose gold and silver sunburst (18,300€ the new model). In any case, the watch imagined in France and manufactured in Switzerland plays in the court of the great watchmakers, with another detail that testifies to this: "it must be as beautiful from the front as from the back". The back reveals part of the automatic movement with micro-rotor on a two-tone plate. The whole thing is made by Swiss craftsmen who perpetuate the know-how of master watchmakers in La Chaux-de-Fonds. And originality is indeed combined with quality, both of the movement and of its case: nestled in their round case, the dials are protected by a curved sapphire crystal with a double anti-reflective treatment. The water resistance has been tested to 50 meters for the steel version and 30 meters for the pink gold version.