Found: A Rare 20th Anniversary Philippe Dufour Simplicity Hits The Market
Only a few weeks have gone by since Philippe Dufour’s 75th birthday and there’s more big news from the world of one of the most admired and coveted independent watchmakers in history.
Today (June 30), at 9:00 AM EST, A Collected Man will post one of the newest – and rarest – of Dufour Simplicities ever made, one of the 20th Anniversary series watches in platinum, with an asking price of $1.3 million. It’s a far cry from the $35,000 price tag when Dufour made his first run of the Simplicity, but the secondary market price has risen to much greater heights in recent years and this specific example has a lot of features that make it even more coveted, both now and in the future.
When Dufour announced he’d be celebrating his 20th Anniversary, he also announced a few particularly interesting bits of information. First, there would be 22 watches made – #00 sold for CHF 1.36 million at Phillips in 2020 and Philippe Dufour would keep #21. Next, the allocation of 10 watches would be chosen through a lottery thanks to help from Dufour’s commercial partner, Claude Sfeir. But prices have come up substantially for “retail” (a rumored nearly 20 times the price of the original run). And while someone like me (who dreams of selling everything else if I could only have a Simplicity) might be sad it is now so far out of reach, it’s hard to argue with thought behind the pricing given the secondary market.
So if the 20th anniversary series was already an incredibly small number of watches (which hundreds of thousands of people want) then this specific piece is even rarer. Only seven of those 22 watches were made with this particularly striking combination of brushed platinum case, intensely blue dial and hinged officer’s caseback. The watch stands out not only as a singular object but as one of the most interesting combinations of details in a watch by Dufour.
Dufour’s guilloché-dialed Simplicity iterations are by far my favorite, with the central pattern really bringing the watch to life. And to top it off, these beautiful and elegant Breguet numerals just seal the deal on how great that dial is. I’m not sure what the average customer might think about the brushed Platinum case, but I like the look and how it plays with the contrast of the dial, hands, and indices, and it actually kind of looks like Tantalum in the picture (now there’s a great idea for a Simplicity).
This is the first time one of the watches from this series of seven has come to market and A Collected Man has a great track record of selling Dufour’s pieces, selling one of his extremely rare and benchmark-setting Grande et Petite Sonnerie wristwatches for $7.63 million in 2021. I expect this one will sell within minutes of the announcement.
There’s not much more that can be said about Dufour’s work that hasn’t already been covered (by Hodinkee and others) time and time again. So instead I leave you with the fantastic photographs by A Collected Man so you can enjoy the watch long after it disappears once again into a private collection.
All photos courtesy A Collected Man.
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For more information on the sale of this rare Philippe Dufour Simplicity visit A Collected Man.
Hodinkee
