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Another day, another cool Vacheron Constantin release. Barely a month on from Watches & Wonders (where I will remind you, Vacheron dropped the most complicated wristwatch ever made), the iconic brand, currently celebrating its 270th anniversary, has released another high complication heater — a skeleton dial, perpetual calendar, minute repeater with tourbillon dressed up as a titanium Overseas.
Coming into 2025, it was pretty clear to see that Vacheron was ready to make some noise. For one thing, the brand was (as I mentioned) celebrating its 270th birthday, something the marketing folks at Vacheron have not been shy about, but more than that, the brand has been on a pretty incredible run over the last few years. Even without the cover of an anniversary year, recent new releases from Vacheron Constantin have increasingly been greeted as objects of interest, both in a technical and cultural sense, and there’s a real feeling that someone at Vacheron HQ clearly knows what they’re doing.
The new Overseas Grand Complication Openface is an objectively impressive offering. Measuring in at 44.5mm across and 13.1mm thick in grade 5 titanium (a material also seen in last year’s Overseas tourbillon) this latest Overseas does feature slightly reworked case proportions, with a narrower bracelet relative to its smaller siblings and what looks to me to be a slightly longer lug to lug and thinner bezel, relative to its admittedly larger case size.
The watch is also water resistant to 30 meters. It’s an impressive amount of water resistance for a minute repeater watch, whose moving parts (like the case-side slider) and need for acoustic resonance don’t typically play nice with water-resistant components like gaskets and screw-down elements, and attempts to balance the acoustic appeal of chiming watches with the everyday utility of water resistance is something we’ve really only started to see broadly in the last decade.
Inside the watch is the Vacheron Constantin Calibre 2755 QP. We’ve seen versions of this movement used before by Vacheron, though mostly in the Traditionnelle case. The movement is finished here with a combination of rhodium-plating and an anthracite gray galvanic treatment, and is visible both through a sapphire caseback and through a transparent sapphire dial.
With its blue tracks and sub-dials, this dial should feel familiar in premise to anyone acquainted with the Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin Skeleton, but is set apart visually by the presence of a large tourbillon at the six o’clock position and an asymmetrical dial layout, with the timekeeping and calendar displays compressed toward the top of the dial. A fun touch here is the adjusted spacing on the dual minute track, with one layer sitting around the outside edge of the dial and the other set slightly in and off-center.
Now, is this the titanium Overseas of my particular dreams? Probably not — I’m far more interested in a standard production titanium Overseas, more in line with 2021’s Everest limited editions (not that I’m exactly in the market). But if we can’t have that, and it seems that (at least for now) we can’t, a proper old-school Vacheron grand complication masquerading as a titanium sports watch is a pretty great consolation, not that this watch comes across as even remotely conciliatory.
Unsurprisingly for a watch of this ilk, the Vacheron Constantin Overseas Grand Complication Openface will be a limited production offering from Vacheron (though not a limited edition), with price available on request. Vacheron Constantin
