Louis Erard continues with their aggressive limited edition release strategy this week with a new collaboration that sees the brand partnering with celebrated watchmaker and jeweler Cédric Johner. Johner began his career as a jeweler at the age of 15 in 1982, and turned to watchmaking later in life. He continues to work out of his Geneva workshop to this day, with a focus on traditional craft, including good old fashioned handwork with traditional tools. He practices what he calls “intuitive watchmaking,” which for him means creating a timepiece without a set plan. This obviously flies in the face of how most modern watches are created, but allows Johner a level of freedom and creativity in his design that would be hard to match otherwise. His work, which consists largely of one-offs and unique pieces, is often characterized by playing with expectations related to geometry and shape, which comes through clearly in this pair of limited edition regulators for Louis Erard.
The Le Régulateur Louis Erard x Cédric Johner limited editions consist of two watches in Louis Erard’s less frequently used 39mm Excellence case. The visual impression of these watches is immediately very different from any other Louis Erard collaboration thanks to the hexagonal bezel, which is a Johner hallmark. The dial arrangement, though, will be familiar to anyone who has been tracking these regulators over the years, with running seconds at 6:00, hours at 12:00, and a centrally mounted minute hand.
Two dial options are available: blue and mauve PVD. Each has a distinctive sunray guilloche pattern that adds quite a bit of texture and visual interest to the dial, with concave subdials for the hours and seconds that provide for additional depth and have a subtle circular brushed finish. Combined with the unique bezel, these watches give you the illusion of a shaped case. That’s a new direction for Louis Erard but it feels like a natural evolution, and a collaboration with someone like Johner (who is not well known outside of the space where watches and jewelry intersect most closely) is a logical opportunity to experiment.
The specs for the Le Régulateur Louis Erard x Cédric Johner limited editions do not stray too far from most Louis Erard releases. The case, as mentioned, is the smaller 39mm Excellence case, and is fully polished. It measures 12.82mm tall and 45.9mm from lug to lug, and wears quite differently from the more commonly used 42mm case that the brand tends to use for these LEs.
The movement is the Sellita SW266-1. It’s visible through the display caseback, and the rotor has been hand decorated by Johner, each with 230 hand-applied beads. This small touch, which is mostly invisible, does a nice job of reinforcing the jewelry based lineage of the piece.
Each dial variant is limited to 178 pieces. The retail price is $5,250. Louis Erard
