Latest Review
“Quiet luxury.” That’s the phrase that kept getting thrown at me during my week with the Parmigiani Fleurier Toric Petite Seconde. “This is so quiet luxury.” It was an almost near-universal response, a constant chorus scoring my time with one of the most talked about new dress watches of 2024. Weirdly, that wasn’t my experience of the watch at all. To me, the Toric Petite Seconde was a dress watch for the guy who doesn’t need to get all that dressy. The guy more likely to be caught in a green chore coat than a cashmere sweater.
Cards on the table, my wardrobe is not all that luxurious. I tend to prefer Levi’s with Blundstones or L.L. Bean flannels and Patagonia Jackets over Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli. A sizable portion of my clothing has been purchased at REI. It’s an aesthetic my brother jokingly calls my “man of the people look” and, while I think that may be an overstatement, it’s probably not far off the mark. Unsurprisingly, my taste in watches tends to skew in a similar direction — I have a predilection for great dive watches and solid steel three-handers. Sure, a two-tone Datejust might make its way into the rotation here or there, but, to balance it out, I’ve spent a good portion of this year falling back in love with digital watches.
I tell you all this so I can say, honestly, that when a brand like Parmigiani Fleurier releases a watch like the Toric, a small seconds dress watch available exclusively in platinum or rose gold, I’m not necessarily the audience they have in mind. That said, when I first encountered the newly refreshed Toric line this past spring, I knew they were something special and that they had the potential to far outstretch their intended purpose. I’m somewhat relieved to say, after a week spent with both the rose gold and platinum variations, I think I’m right.
To be fair, I may be biased. I’ve said openly in the past that Parmigiani Fleurier is a brand for which I carry a lot of affection. It’s also true that, when attempting to parse a watch, it certainly helps to sit down with the relevant brand’s CEO and have him explain the thought and intention behind the watch in detail (as I did with Guido Terreni several months ago), but at the end of the day, what a watch is will always be less a product of its development process, and more a synthesis of how it’s worn in the real world.
Put another way, no work is complete until an audience has had a chance to react to it. Now, I won’t claim that insight as my own, nor can I properly credit the first person to enunciate it (although David Bowie did a fairly effective job of communicating the concept in a number of interviews over the decades), but I do stand by the idea. All the intentionality in the world can’t set a watch apart, only the audience’s reaction can.
My time with the Toric Petite Seconde happened to coincide with a week in New York City spent hanging out at HODINKEE’s House of Craft event. I was there in a civilian capacity, and over a few days, had a great time meeting and speaking with a whole load of collectors. In many ways, it was the perfect proving ground for the Toric, and it rose to the occasion. In a room filled with some of the most impressive and sought-after watches in the world, the Toric more than held its own, and I spent a good portion of the week pulling it off my own wrist to show it around.
More important than that, in my time with the Toric Petite Seconde, it never felt out of place on my wrist. Despite having never been intended for that particular real estate, there was not a collector in the room who seemed to reject the premise of the Toric on my wrist. Part of that, I acknowledge, stems from our collective tendency as watch enthusiasts to nudge each other in the direction of watches we might not otherwise be bold enough to embrace, but a bigger part of it is rooted in the universality of the Toric.
I’m a big believer in judging watches on how effectively they fulfill the promise of their premise. That is to say, I try to judge watches not against some imagined, unrelated ideal but rather by how close a watch gets to its own stated goals. On that front, the Toric is an undeniable success, executing on the promise of a beautifully finished, eminently wearable three-hand dress watch with aplomb. In fact, if you were to boil the Toric’s appeal down to one thing, it would be execution. After all, most of us have, at one point or another, spent time with a straightforward three-hander, haven’t we? You can pick up a watch in the same thematic mold as the Toric Petite Seconde for a couple hundred bucks, so what makes this watch worth so much more?
With a watch this simple, it all comes down to the details. To start, the Toric’s case is shockingly complex, with a knurled bezel, lugs that seem to hug the mid-case, and a slim, flying saucer shape. It’s a familiar shape to those with an eye for earlier iterations of the Toric but simplified and refined — streamlined, if you will, for a modern sensibility. It’s a case architecture that doesn’t scream from across the room but wakes up the closer you get to it; all while doing a great job of balancing the look of previous iterations with the “new Parmigiani look” curated under Guido Terreni.
Nowhere is this new look more evident than on the dial, which radically reinvents the look of the Toric, and for the better. Gone are the classical elements and guillochage that had previously defined the line. Here they are replaced by a hand-grained texture, with a sunken sub-dial and sharply polished markers. The dials are, at first blush, stark, but suit the watches brilliantly, and help to differentiate them from the Tonda lineup, where guilloché dials remain the norm.
As I’ve mentioned the Toric collection is, to start, available in two configurations. The first of these, in 18k rose gold, is paired with a champagne dial, with rose gold dial furniture. The second, in platinum, features a pale green dial with rhodium-plated dial furniture. Each comes on a sueded alligator strap with a matching pin-buckle, which was chosen to ensure complete visibility of the strikingly finished movement without visual obstruction, as there would have been with a deployant clasp. The straps are comfortable and complement the watches. I admit that I was confused by the color pairings initially, but after some time, they do feel appropriately allocated, neither overwhelming nor underselling the watches with which they are matched.
Practically, the case measures 40.6mm across and 8.8mm thick. With its short lugs, the Toric should wear well on a wide variety of wrists (it seems to suit my 7.5-inch wrist particularly nicely), but it is hard to deny that it is, for a time-only dress watch, relatively broad. I don’t mean this as a critique, just something to be aware of — this may not quite be the unisex dress watch of your dreams, and the smallest-wristed of us may do better to look elsewhere.
That said, the case thickness is a dream. I tend to call anything under about 10mm thick a ‘thin’ watch, and this wears its thinness well, though, interestingly, it is both thicker and wider than the Tonda PF Micro-Rotor. It’s robust and well proportioned, without feeling like it’s carrying any extra weight, and the watch is served well by its own scale (of course, I wouldn’t mind seeing maybe a 37mm version at some point down the line).
Turning the watch around, you’ll find the hand-wound PF780 movement. The in-house caliber matches the case handsomely, with a clearly contemporary architecture, and should catch the eye of even the most discerning enthusiast. The double barrel movement is simple in its design, but remarkable in its implementation, evoking both the best of classical movement finishing and modern Swiss finishing techniques. Here, the expansive bridges are finished with a Côtes de Fleurier pattern, while the plate is decorated with a classic sandblasted finish. This look — though now frequently associated with English watchmakers like George Daniels — is a traditional one, appearing on many of the watches of all-time masters like Abraham-Louis Breguet.
Interacting with the movement itself is a joy, thanks in large part to the large and tactile crown. Detents are sharp, and the winding experience itself stands out as particularly pleasant. Per Terreni, this touch point was of particular importance when developing this watch, something which makes a tremendous amount of sense once you consider that winding and setting the watch is the only point of direct mechanical contact one might have with the watch, considering its lack of complication or extraneous functions. It’s a level of care I’d love to see from more brands, at all price points.
It seems almost trite to say, but in my time with the Parmigiani Fleurier Toric Petite Seconde, I kept thinking of it as “not your father’s Parmigiani.” The Toric Petite Seconde may be expensive (CHF 45,000 in 18k rose gold and CHF 52,000 in platinum), but this is the Toric I can wear with a flannel shirt and a canvas jacket when most would pair it with a suit and tie. As it turns out, that balance between classic and contemporary is the standout feature of the new Toric. The watch manages to dance along that perilous knife’s edge with deftness, managing to feel timeless without feeling stodgy. And that’s a hell of a trick. Parmigiani Fleurier
