Girard-Perregaux Laureato Chronograph Aston Martin Edition: A Lean, Green Racing Machine for the Wrist

Girard-Perregaux began its partnership with British luxury carmaker Aston Martin in 2021 and has rolled out several co-branded timepieces in the years since, most of them hailing from the venerable Swiss brand’s sport-oriented Laureato family. Like the coveted, stylish roadsters famously favored by James Bond, the watches have exhibited the marque’s traditional livery colors and utilized weight-reducing high-tech materials in their construction, including titanium, ceramics, and, recently, forged carbon. The latest Laureato Chronograph Aston Martin Edition arrived this week, limited to 188 pieces and distinguished by its exquisitely finished titanium case and iridescent green dial.

The case measures 42mm in diameter and 12.16mm thick, with a nonreflective sapphire crystal over the dial. Its array of brushed and polished finishing on its many surfaces and facets — courtesy of the Laureato’s signature octagonal bezel and its complex integrated bracelet — lends an alluring character to the bodywork of this wrist-borne roadster. The case’s circular plinth, facets and pushers and the bracelet’s central links are particularly notable for their gleaming polished finish. Titanium, as its proponents are well aware, is lauded for its lightness, strength, resistance to corrosion and magnetism, and hypoallergenic qualities, all of which are advantageous in both automaking and watchmaking.

The dial is the star of the show, of course, with its very distinctive shade of green, the product of a paint job used on Aston Martin vehicles and executed by means of an intricate technological process. Fourteen manufacturing steps are required to make the dial, whose dazzling surface hue is achieved via the application of 15 ultra-thin layers of paint and two cooking cycles. Using this process for a watch dial rather than a car’s body requires much smaller tolerances, as one would expect, and a special protracted filtration method has been employed here to eliminate any residual grains that could taint the finished product. 

Girard-Perregaux says that the iridescent green dial subtly reflects light and can even appear to transition from green to orange tones depending on the light. I am anxious to get this watch in my own hands to discover if this is true, but until then some other dial details are also worthy of mention. The hour and minute hands are openworked to echo the look of an Aston Martin grille and the applied, baton-shaped hour markers have a grey-toned PVD finish that reflects the matte appearance of the titanium case. The hands and markers are coated in a white luminous material that glows green in the dark. The central, black-tipped chronograph hand sweeps along a minute track inscribed on the dial’s flange. The three subdial counters at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock — for 30 minutes, 12 hours, and running seconds — are framed with the same grey-PVD color as the markers and have a snailed center. A date window completes the picture at 4:30. 

A bit of trivia: the original Girard-Perregaux Laureato was launched in 1975, at the height of the first wave of integrated-bracelet sport-luxury timepieces, and has often been compared to two arguably more famous contemporaries from that era, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak (1972) and Patek Philippe Nautilus (1976). The Laureato, however, holds the distinction of being the only one of that generation to contain an in-house movement — as it still does today. Beating behind a sapphire caseback emblazoned with an Aston-Martin logo is the manufacture Caliber GP03300-2451, whose host of eye-catching details include circular côtes de Genève on the rotor, straight côtes de Genève on the bridges, circular graining on the mainplate, polished sinks, thermally blued and mirror-polished screws, and engraved gilded text. All of these decorative embellishments enhance an already impressive mechanical engine, with a balance frequency of 28,800 vph and a power reserve of 46 hours.

The Girard-Perregaux Laureato Chronograph Aston Martin Edition is available worldwide at Girard-Perregaux retailers, priced at $22,700 in the U.S.