Louis Erard’s Most Ambitious Collaboration Yet: a New Tourbillon with Old Friend Alain Silberstein

This week, Louis Erard caps a fruitful, multiyear relationship with Alain Silberstein that has had a profound impact on the stock of both parties in the larger watch space. Silberstein, after a period where his watches were all the rage, had faded somewhat from our collective memory by 2021, and Louis Erard, too, was adrift. They made very high quality and unique watches for the money, but weren’t really the focus of enthusiasts and collectors. Now, through a series of collaborations with Silberstein and others, Louis Erard occupies a very different niche in the collector arena, and we’ve seen a renewed interest in Silberstein’s work as well in the years since his design language has been put spotlighted by these collaborations. Now, in what feels like a culmination of the work they’ve done together, Louis Erard has released a limited edition box set that adds a new color option to a prior collaboration, and, oh yeah, a tourbillon. No big deal. 

The Le Triptyque Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Khaki is a new spin on their second collaboration, a collection of three watches (available as a collector’s set) featuring a unique titanium case framed with brancards. The watches in that collection featured a regulator, a day-date complication, and a chronograph, all with the hallmark Silberstein combination of colorful shapes in lieu of traditional hands. For this set, the black dials have been swapped for a dark green khaki, and the chronograph is now a tourbillon. It’s kind of hard to believe, so I’ll reiterate: Louis Erard’s latest release is a tourbillon. 

While the regulator and “La Semaine” watches seen here are available to buy individually outside of this triptych, the tourbillon can only be purchased as part of the set. It’s Louis Erard’s first tourbillon, which underscores the level of importance they place on the relationship with Silberstein. Part of Louis Erard’s philosophy over these last several years as they’ve embraced working with a huge variety of partners on exotic limited editions is the idea of making the inaccessible accessible. Through Louis Erard, collectors have an opportunity to own a watch with Vianney Halter’s or Konstantin Chaykin’s name on the dial – something that under most circumstances would simply be impossible for the vast majority of enthusiasts. So it kind of makes sense that they’d present a tourbillon in a (relatively) accessible way. 

And it’s not just any tourbillon. Naturally, it’s a regulator tourbillon, with a manually wound movement and 100 hours of power reserve. The tourbillon cage, exposed at the 6:00 position, makes a full rotation every 60 seconds, and Louis Erard has kept the squiggly yellow second hand to help mark the time. The case of the new tourbillon is kept rather tidy, measuring 40mm in diameter and 11.8mm tall. 

The “La Semaine” (which features a day wheel with seven different stylized faces meant to capture the mood of each day of the week) and Le Régulateur references are essentially ports of the earlier releases, now in dark shades of green. Each is limited to 178 pieces, with a retail price set at CHF 4,000.

The box set is limited to 78, and has a retail price of CHF 22,222. This is the only way you can purchase the tourbillon, and even with two additional watches included in the package, it still turns out to be one of the more affordable Swiss tourbillons we’ve seen. There’s certainly no shortable of limited editions and collaborations these days, but this one feels weirdly significant, like it sums up the story of this period of collab-fever. It’s certainly a genuinely impressive accomplishment for Louis Erard, and puts an exclamation point on this period in the brand’s history. Louis Erard