Yves Saint Laurent Reverso

Overall Condition: Very good condition overall. Case shows normal signs of wear consistent with age and use. Dial and handset are in great condition.

We love vintage watches for plenty of reasons, but the stories are usually what get us. And this one has a particularly good one. By the 1970s, Yves Saint Laurent had already changed the way people dressed. Le Smoking, safari jackets, Mondrian dresses, and a new kind of gender-fluid glamour had established the designer as one of fashion’s great modernists. Apparently, the wrist wasn’t going to escape his attention either.

This extraordinary 18K gold wristwatch takes the basic premise of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s famous Reverso — a rectangular watch with a case that can turn over within its frame — and filters it through a distinctly Saint Laurent lens. Rather than simply imitate the Art Deco original, YSL turned the architecture into something softer, bolder, and considerably more fashion-minded.

The central case is framed by wonderfully exaggerated horizontal scrolls at the top and bottom, giving the watch an almost architectural quality. Because the rotating section forms the widest point of the composition, the whole thing feels deliberately substantial through its center before narrowing dramatically into the strap. It’s an unusual proportion, but an extremely successful one.

The dial is equally clever. Only the cardinal Arabic numerals — 3, 6, 9, and 12 — interrupt an otherwise beautifully spare surface, while a striped railroad-style minute track sits unexpectedly inside the dial rather than around its perimeter. Slender black hands complete the composition. There’s something wonderfully Saint Laurent about the tension between restraint and embellishment: just when you think the design is completely minimal, another detail appears.

Fashion watches are often treated as something separate from “serious” watch collecting. This one makes a persuasive argument against that distinction. It’s beautifully made, wonderfully strange, unmistakably of its era, and connected to one of the most important names in 20th-century design.

In 18K gold and with enough personality to make most rectangular dress watches look positively conventional, this Yves Saint Laurent is ready for its next fashionable custodian.