PACIFIC BLUE

When humans began to measure time, we turned to the skies. While we have no written records, we do know that ancient humans tracked the motion of celestial objects, and common sense tells us that the day and night cycle would have been obvious.

After all, our own internal clocks run on this, which we confirmed experimentally and know today as circadian rhythms. That very name, circadian is derived from two Latin words, circa (about) and dies (day). It would be many millennia before we could match these internal clocks, but our ancestors did a bang-up job of using external objects to create broader measures of time, for weeks, months and years.

Calendars were probably the first real external timekeeping we ever managed, and they eventually got us into all manner of conflicts between different cultural standards. Wherever people built clocks of some kind, they were likely to be about tracking cycles of some kind, like the phases of the moon. These instruments gave the human species, and only us, the ability to know our place in time and space. Little did we know that such a wonder would someday come to our wrists in a form as stylish as the Tonda PF Annual Calendar.

This particular story you are reading is about a variant of that handsome watch, only slightly more handsome and much rarer. This one is the SHH Limited Edition in a shade of blue entirely exclusive to this 25-watch limited run. This is not merely a colour that has been tacked on, or borrowed from elsewhere in the PF assortment. Instead, it has been drawn from nature itself, as interpreted by legendary architect Le Corbusier and the palette of colours he advocated in his Architectural Polychromy essay of 1931. Sincere Fine Watches and Parmigiani Fleurier inform us that this colour is called Pacific Blue, and blends blue and grey for a subtle effect. The aim was to deliver a degree of “softness and clarity to the guilloché dial of the Tonda PF Annual Calendar dedicated to Sincere Fine Watches.”