Review: Trilobe Une Folle Journée

Watches have been around for a while and so, inevitably, they start to get a bit predictable. Couple of hands, even three maybe, and twelve markers for them to point at like bemused children. Well, French outfit Trilobe thought that was all a bit boring, so they came up with this: the Trilobe Une Folle Journée.

A massive thanks goes to the guys at The Limited Edition who allowed us to film this and a whole host of other incredible timepieces. If you’ve got a hankering for some incredible watchmaking, check out the link to their site in the description.

Background

This is the Trilobe Une Folle Journée, and the name literally means, “a crazy day.” Since Trilobe’s 2018 launch, it’s been a crazy day, week, month and a few years too, winning awards, earning critical acclaim and generally being considered all round pretty cool.

But how did we get to this crazy day? Well, around 2018, French investment bank associate Gautier Massonneau decided he wanted to buy an A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk. Yes, the legendary $100,000 German watch based on the clock in the Dresden Opera House.

The was only one problem: Gautier did not have $100,000 to spend on a watch, so he did what any sane person does and quit a stable job to go and make his own watch instead. He was obsessed with the idea of three, basing his Trilobe logo on the three overlapping circles that make up the trefoil shape found in plants like clovers.

The whole watch concept followed suit, assembled from three individual rings to create an eccentric display of hours, minutes and seconds. I can imagine Gautier obsessing over this three-ringed watch to a point of near madness, quitting his job so he could spend his time fashioning it from a heap of mashed potato.

Gautier did actually try building his vision himself, but then he remembered he wasn’t a watchmaker, so he hopped over to Switzerland to find someone who could. And he found Chronode, a company that can. Can what? Anything you want. These guys do stuff for MB&F, Czapek and HYT. They’re like wizards, but instead of turning people into frogs, they turn ridiculous ideas into watches. And that’s what they did for Gautier.

Now, much like 1998 pop sensation Cleopatra, who based an entire career around the idea that the name Cleopatra rhymes with “comin’ atcha”, you might think that this circular obsession could be very limited for Gautier and Trilobe. Well, apparently not, because the mashed potato has remained malleable enough to turn it into a few different watches. There’s four in the collection, with the Une Folle Journée being the most insane rendition of the three-ringed approach to watchmaking.

As a watch, it’s actually surprisingly straightforward. There’s hours, minutes and seconds from the outermost ring in, with the hours and minutes read from a little triangle indicator towards the bottom. Seconds sit dead centre, and to be honest I’m not really sure how you read those, save for knowing the watch is working by the virtue of the ring spinning around.

If you’re looking for a watch to give you accurate measurement to within, say, five minutes, this isn’t it. Whilst the X-Centric calibre is without doubt very accurate, the display itself gives as much of a care towards the reading of time as you could imagine its French owner doing. It’s about twenty-five minutes past. What more do you want?

But where a slightly late-running day turns into a crazy one is really less about the how of this watch and more about the what, because turn this watch on its side and things start getting even more Close Encounters.

Review

So, this X-Centric movement, developed by Chronode, is the base for all of Trilobe’s off-centre time displays—but here it’s been turned up to eleven to create a watch that’s one part timekeeper and three parts mothership.

Firstly, you have the rings themselves. They make more sense than they should really, what with the execution being so slick, and it’s only really with more time that brows start to furrow and small, “Huh” noises start to make themselves heard. It’s like a magic trick that’s just so imperceptible that you only realise that it’s impossible several hours later.

The outermost hour ring is geared on the inside edge, basically making it an inverted wheel as large as the 40mm titanium case itself. The minute ring is similar, but smaller, and uses ruby rollers to keep it concentric. Then there’s the seconds ring which you would assume does something similar. It does not.

Peer into the mechanism and it becomes apparent that this ring is supported by absolutely nothing at all. It’s just floating there, happily defying physics like it’s the most normal thing in the world. There’s a pivot point in the centre, but given the sheer amount of nothing in between, the two can only possibly be connected by witchcraft.

Or, in this case, sapphire. With an impressive layer of anti-reflective coating, the seconds disk does an incredibly good impression of a UFO, hovering and spinning above the movement. And when I say above, this is where the watch’s part trick really shines. The case itself may be a slender 10.2mm tall, but the watch in its entirety is closer to 18mm, and that’s thanks to a crystal that even the Corum Bubble gets a sweat on about.

It's a towering dome that almost doubles the watch’s thickness, and I can already hear you asking, “Why, for the love of all that is holy, why?”, and I’ll tell you. I don’t know. What I can tell you is that each of those rings is lifted above the dial with a series of risers, pushing each higher and higher so the whole thing looks like a mad eyeball.

Points for attention to detail though, because each of the rings is also angled outwards to get it as close to the crystal as possible. And that’s really the whole vibe of this watch, attention to detail. Yeah, it’s madder than a rottweiler with a gun, but it’s executed to such a high level that you almost don’t notice. Imagine if the gun-toting canine also had on a hard hat and hi-vis vest, and you might start to think it’s all supposed to be like that and that you’re the odd one.

This watch, if it wasn’t so well made would be a gimmick. Honestly. You’d look at it and think it was stupid. But the efforts Chronode have gone to in building this to an exceptionally high standard completely turn that thought around. Now it’s a sculpture, an executive desk toy for the wrist. It could star in a movie about time travel and no one would question it.

And at €23,500, whilst you’re hardly going to buy ten and give one to all your friends, it’s actually a surprisingly reasonable price all things considered. Yes, I know most of you will now be spitting at the screen at the idea of a “bargain” €23,500 watch, but consider that it’s made by the people who make MB&F watches and that the similar LM101 costs around three times as much and—well, make of that what you will.

The conclusion here really is that watchmaking is far from optimal. We haven’t reached a state of watch-based entropy just yet, when absolutely everything just looks like a Submariner. We’re getting there, but there’s a still a few crazy gems like this out there to enjoy yet.

What do you think of the Trilobe Une Folle Journée? Crazier than wallpaper paste or a watch you’d happily wear?