“On the other side, our gold skeleton dancers will engage in lovemaking under the starry sky in the great tradition of the polissonne watches of the 19th century.” (The category is known as saucy watches in English.) Delamuraz said he is determined to “continue the legacy, with respect, for this art to survive.”Īnd that, he added, will require the brand to “adapt the know-how to the wishes of today’s customers.”Īt De Bethune, the brand’s master watchmaker and co-founder Denis Flageollet seems to be shaking up the automaton world.įor the past year he has been working on a two-sided wrist watch with “a dance scene of two characters” inspired by the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, on one side, he wrote in an email. The company’s founder, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, was famous for the automatons he made during the 18th century, and Mr. The price is 250,000 Swiss francs ($271,331) and the brand said that three were ordered immediately following its debut. That is surrounded by a grooved disc that looks like a vinyl record and can rotate on demand, and will be decorated with the buyer’s selection of six covers from among a list of 23 Stones albums and a depiction of the famous Stones logo, which moves up and down as the red tongue moves left and right. The timepiece has a standard dial with markers and hands that sits off-center in the 43-millimeter red gold case, leaving room for a stage set with tiny versions of Charlie Watts’s drums and Keith Richards’s five-string guitar, shaped by hand from a block of red gold, engraved and then painted.

Automaton story