Lifestyle

The Epitome of Excess – Excalibur Superbia

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  • October 1, 2020
  • 2 minutes read

Pride and excess are two halves of Roger Dubuis’ ethos, a duality that allows unfettered exploring of new territories and the ability to demonstrate the other side of its “personality”: dramatic singularity.

The result is a proud lineage of over the top and utterly contemporary timepieces, where the brand that dares to be different puts technique at the service of aesthetics. In its latest demonstration of all the above, Excalibur Superbia is a stunning contemporary epitome of extravagance guaranteed to send the senses of the most hardened hyper watch aficionado into overdrive.

Bold and Exquisite

The ultimate example of the Maison’s unshakable pride and excess, Excalibur Superbia is crafted in palladium-enriched white gold and set with exactly 600 precious white diamonds and blue sapphires. This offers a truly extravagant (and ideal) housing for Roger Dubuis iconic signature calibre: a brand-new DOUBLE FLYING TOURBILLON movement; the RD108SQ, the first double-regulator calibre connected with a differential, built up in volume and adorned with a diamond-set star. In the RD108SQ, the double flying tourbillon is transformed into the ultimate iconic signature.

Aptly demonstrated by multiple tricks embodied in this latest iteration of off-the-radar hyper horology, the devil, as Roger Dubuis knows all too well, is in the details. In the Excalibur Superbia, Roger Dubuis once again reinvents the game like no one ever has before.

Sending it firmly into the hallowed halls of World Premieres, what makes the Excalibur Superbia truly bold is that every stone set on the flange, the bezel, the case and the crown is tetrahedron shaped and assembled with an invisible setting on curved surfaces. The hardest way to set a stone, an invisible setting becomes nearly impossible when required on a curved surface.

Where No Man Dares to Tread

Not only has no jeweler or watchmaker ever dared to set a piece in this way, certainly no one has tried it on a masculine watch. Until now. In this masterpiece in which the complexity of the pattern surpasses any norm known to man, master craftsmen at the Maison’s Geneva Manufacture have set about creating a backbone structure to encapsulate each stone from the back, complying with the brand’s total determination to avoid any material between the stones themselves.

To complicate matters further, each and every glittering stone in the Excalibur Superbia is a tetrahedron, a shape that requires boundless cutting skill as its extreme thinness greatly increases the risk of breaking. The concept of impossible is nothing if not meaningless at Roger Dubuis where the next challenge is simply round the corner. Not only is every stone tetrahedron-shaped, the pattern was designed so that all 238 stones featured in the case of the Excalibur Superbia has a different shape and is thus singular.

The test of Roger Dubuis setters’ skill does not stop here, however. The final sting in the tail of the Excalibur Superbia comes with the grooving – the last step required to complete the invisible setting with the previously perfectly triangulated stones. And just for good measure, reaching the very pinnacle of complexity Roger Dubuis-style, this already painstaking, ground-breaking process has been entirely achieved on a curved surface.

Simple, straight and utterly frank, the lines of this exceptional piece of artistry are strongly reminiscent of the spatial art forms favoured by interior design artist KAZ SHIRANE with whom the brand that dares to be different shares a number of characteristics – not least from a visual perspective.

Memento Mori

A hyper watch for a hyper tribe, the Excalibur Superbia is the demonstration of a shared mindset focused on living life to the fullest extent and with the greatest intensity. In the grand tradition of memento mori pocket watches, and as a reminder that this time on earth is short and must be filled with unfettered pleasure, madness and freedom, the movement of the Excalibur Superbia is secretly inscribed with the words Memento mori, a detail that will henceforth feature on each Hyperwatch created by the Maison. Because to remember you must die is to remember you must live – and is unquestionably the most exciting way to experience hyper horology.

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