Breguet’s Classique Souscription 2025 wristwatch, which commemorates the brand’s 250th anniversary, tells a story of pioneering business and horological acumen
At a glance, the Breguet Classique Souscription 2025 is almost bare. One hand against a white dial, and barely any hint of ornamentation. But the watch doesn’t need complexity to impress—it has history on its side.
“We wanted to surprise people,” says Gregory Kissling, CEO of Breguet, when quizzed about why the brand had opted for a simple—by Breguet’s standards—time-only watch. In all fairness, though, describing the Classique Souscription 2025 wristwatch as ‘simple’ would be doing it a disservice.
Although the watch appears aesthetically austere, featuring a pristine white dial with only one hand to tell the time, the Classique Souscription expresses Breguet’s illustrious history just as eruditely as any of the brand’s famously technically sophisticated complication watches.
Breguet was founded 250 years ago by its namesake founder, Abraham-Louis Breguet, whose creations are hailed as vital to the very spirit and progress of the art of high-end watchmaking. From the eponymous master watchmaker’s groundbreaking inventions such as the world’s first automatic timekeeper in 1780 and the keyless winding mechanism in 1830, to the company’s modern-day creations that include stunning tourbillons, minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, and sophisticated dress watches, timepieces bearing the Breguet inscription are favoured by experienced collectors who know a thing or two about horology.
And Kissling imagines that it is this same group of aficionados who would be pleasantly astonished by the Classique Souscription. “(It isn’t) a grand complication, as some might have expected,” he says, but added that it is a watch with “a great deal of richness”.
Indeed, the Classique Souscription tells a story of progressive thought, watchmaking invention, and business acumen—essential qualities that ensure the success of any modern watch company, which were established centuries ago by Abraham-Louis Breguet.
The watch itself traces its roots to pocket watches Breguet made in 1796. The watchmaker had just fled to Switzerland to escape the French Revolution, and had started his watchmaking workshop. Among his offerings were ‘Souscription’ watches—robust and reliable single-hand pocket watches, which customers had to make a down payment for. In turn, the income generated from these ‘Souscription’ pocket watches helped set Breguet’s business on a firm footing and broaden his customer base, while allowing him to embark on more ambitious creations.
“Not only did it reinvent the watch, but it also reinvented the way it was sold,” says the brand’s head of patrimony, Emmanuel Breguet, who is also the seventh generation descendant of the founder.
Reimagined as a regal dress watch, the Classique Souscription bears its predecessors’ aesthetic purity and mechanical robustness, even as it is lavished with modern touches. The immaculate dial is fashioned in grand feu (“high fired”) enamel, decorated with black enamel numerals and markers, and discreet inscriptions bearing the word “Souscription”, the watch’s serial number, and Breguet’s signature near the centre.
Meanwhile, the polished and elegant 40mm case is crafted in “Breguet gold”, the brand’s proprietary alloy composed of 75 per cent gold, and enriched with silver, copper and palladium, which promises to be more resistant to discolouration and retain its brilliance over time.
The back of the watch, however, presents an entirely different facet. Framed by a newly developed guilloche pattern, the open case back grants full view of the watch’s new hand-wound movement. Crafted in gilded brass that takes on the same hue as Breguet gold, the movement is as beautiful as it is robust; decorated with typology engravings that appeared on the first Souscription watches, while delivering top-notch precision, shock resistance with its unique pare-chute system first introduced in 1790, and up to four days of power reserve.
“This is the first time that we have taken a pocket watch and adapted it to a wristwatch format, respecting as closely as possible the architecture of the original timepiece,” explains Kissling. But more importantly, he adds, that the Classique Souscription was created “to tell a story—our story.”
