Twenty-five years ago Ulysse Nardin released a watch with no dial, no hands and no crown, and horology has never quite recovered. The Freak of 2001 put its entire movement on display and set it spinning — a flying carousel that rotates once an hour, telling the time with its own architecture — and in doing so introduced silicon to watchmaking, a material the whole industry now takes for granted.
For the anniversary, the Manufacture has dressed its enfant terrible in couture. Two new Freak [ONE] editions, each limited to 99 pieces, take the 44mm titanium flyer in opposite directions. The Freak [ONE Guilloché] lays a hand-worked guilloché-flinqué “Maille” pattern across the hour disc in warm sand tones, pairing mechanical radicalism with one of decoration’s oldest crafts. The Freak [ONE Blue Enamel] goes deeper still: a gold hour disc engraved with sunray guilloché, then coated in vivid blue grand feu enamel by the specialists at Donzé Cadrans, fired at some 800 degrees until the colour turns to glass.
Beneath the artistry, the UN-240 calibre remains gloriously strange — roughly 95 per cent of its components are in motion, regulated by a DIAMonSIL escapement with silicon balance and hairspring, wound by the brand’s patented Grinder system and good for 90 hours of reserve. Each is priced at $89,800.
The Freak has always been a collector’s shibboleth, the kind of watch that identifies its wearer as someone interested in ideas rather than logos. A quarter-century on, with haute décoration now layered over haute mécanique, these two editions feel like the argument settled: the strangest watch in Switzerland has become one of its most collectible. The Gulf’s independent-minded collectors, who took to the Freak early, will need to move quickly — 99 of each will not go far.
