ReviewWear It Like Beckham: The Breitling Chronomat Automatic 36 Victoria Beckham
Six new Breitling watches in collaboration with British style icon and designer Victoria Beckham, marries her two loves, fashion and watches
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One of the iconic moments in pop-culture happened in January 1998 when the ‘it’ couple David and Victoria Beckham made a public announcement of their engagement, dressed alike: matching black ensembles, gold and diamond rings, and 18-karat yellow gold Rolex Yacht-Masters. Over the years, Victoria has flaunted other Rolexes—Datejust and Daytona—and even a Patek Philippe Nautilus from her personal watch collection. The well-known style icon was even named ‘Posh Spice’ during her stint with British pop band Spice Girls, and after hanging up her popstar boots, she launched a limited-run line of denim trousers in 2004 for a whopping $300 (approximately ₹24,800) under the name VB Rocks, in collaboration with American denim brand, Rock & Republic. The new sporty-chic Breitling Chronomat Automatic 36 Victoria Beckham then seems like a logical move through which Ms Beckham has successfully united her love for watches and fashion. Available in six dial colours and two metal options, the Breitling X Victoria Beckham time-and-date versions mix brand signatures with the zing of Posh Spice.
Breitling X Victoria Beckham: Staying True To The Chronomat Heritage
Traditionally, the Breitling Chronomat collection consists of mostly dress watches after the case sizes: 32, 36 and 38, GMT 40, and South Sea line with multi-coloured diamond-studded bezels, and even 42mm chronographs named after top sporting events, namely the Super Bowl and Six Nations Wales. ‘Chronomat’ has two meanings: a portmanteau of chronograph and automatic, and ‘chronograph for mathematics’. It harks to the brand’s heritage of aviation watches, which gpes back to 1940, when the brand patented its pioneering invention of a rotating bezel with circuitous slide-rule scale, which is seen to this day in their Navitimer collection.
The Breitling Chronomat, co-designed with Victoria Beckham, revamps the 36mm variant; both versions weigh 104.0g and are 10mm thick. All the six new variants sport dials inspired by vivid shades from Beckham’s spring/summer 2024 palette—dove grey, midnight blue, peppermint, and sand/champagne. Creating a bi-colour ensemble, these dials are paired with metal bodies in stainless steel and 18-karat gold. Available as a total of 1,500 pieces, the dials indicate the limitations with the stainless-steel versions printed with ‘one of 400’, while the gold versions having ‘one of 100’. The gold variants come with a co-branded travel pouch. Further, five versions feature silver-polished baton hour markers with applied Super-LumiNova, while the champagne version with gold case features lab-grown diamonds for hour markers. A tiny date aperture sits at six o’clock.
A Piece Of Beckham
Much to the collector’s delight, the variants are engraved with the Victoria Beckham branding, as a ‘VB’ logo for the counterweight on the seconds hand, as well as on the trademark rouleaux bracelets above the concealed butterfly clasp, and on the screwed-in caseback. The unidirectional bezel features raised rider tabs at every quarter-hour mark. An onion-shaped crown and antireflective cambered sapphire crystal for the glass and caseback completes the look for the watch that provides 100m of water resistance.
All Victoria Beckham versions, just as the classic Chronomat Automatic 36 with diamond-encrusted bezels, are powered by the same COSC-certified chronometer calibre 10 by Breitling. The power reserve lasts approximately 42 hours if kept in the watch box for an extended time. However, when worn the wrist the self-winding automatic movement keeps the watch running till you take it off. With 25 jewels, the movements beats at 28,800vph.
The Breitling Chronomat Automatic 36 Victoria Beckham, looking sharp, classy with subtle glitz is very much like the Beckham missus’s personal style, on which she appears to always get it right.
