All the Wildest, Rarest, Most Beautiful Watches at a High-End Vintage Watch Party

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If you were to rank top-tier watch brands by how difficult their names are to pronounce, Jaeger-LeCoultre would claim first place by a Geneva mile (deceptively long because traffic plus teeny Euro streets). AJ Michalka, one half of the pop (and watch-collecting) duo Aly & AJ, tried her hand at saying it during the brand’s presentation of The Collectibles, its hand-picked collection of vintage treasures, at Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Beverly Hills boutique last Thursday night. “It’s Zhe-zher LeCou-ture,” she told me, confidently. “I was looking at it online on the way here and my boyfriend was laughing at me. I was like, ‘No, babe, I gotta get this right, this is tripping me out.’ ” Lacking both a Swiss-German accent and the mettle necessary to flub the pronunciation in front of my peers, I simply called the brand JLC all night.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of The Collectibles, organized for…JLC’s…190th anniversary, for months now. For The Collectibles, JLC sourced a clutch of the brand’s most covetable vintage watches, restored them, and is now putting the one-of-one pieces up for sale. (As the event wound down, the invited group of press, collectors, and dealers huddled together to watch an older gentleman in a chunky blue cardigan punch his credit card information in to secure a piece. Smart man: nearly all of the collection is gone already.) Jaeger released the first installment in January, which included shrunken-down tickers strung with Tahitian pearls and beautiful alarm-clock watches specially designed to help the wearer avoid getting parking tickets. Brilliant!

This second batch of Collectibles is as museum-worthy as the first. JLC proved that it knew about lacquer dials before they were cool with a Bordeaux-colored Reverso. The Quartermaster with a 24-hour dial, celebrating the brand’s entry to the American market, was a personal favorite. But the true star of the night was the hand-painted version of the Memovox, JLC’s alarm-clock watch. The deep blue dial, with its visible brush strokes, earned this piece the nickname “Lapis Lazuli.”

In addition to the pieces JLC had on display, the attendees brought a ton of firepower themselves. I scoped the best watches at the event and chatted with attendees about what they wore.

Aly, one half of musical duo Aly & AJ