Throughout his five-year term as CEO of Parmigiani Fleurier, Guido Terreni has championed quiet luxury’s far more sophisticated older sibling – what he terms “private luxury.” “Our watches are for the owner,” says Terreni. “They are not for social recognition, nor to obey the consumeristic approach of what society is obliging you to buy.”
The genial, softly spoken Swiss-Italian spent two decades planting Bulgari’s stylish flag in fine watchmaking’s protestant map before being headhunted to rescue Parmigiani in 2021.
When Terreni introduced Parmigiani’s reworking of its Toric collection in 2024, the redesigned pieces were dramatically different, minimal, and elegant. They were dress watches that looked – and indeed were – expensive yet understated. But the real ‘for-the-owner’ detail was largely missed, even by the cognoscenti.
Look closely at the strap and you’ll see that the stitching is unlike that commonly used elsewhere: small stitches are set at a distance from one another, where typically they’d segue one to the next. This, says Terreni, is done punto a mano – stitched by hand – according to a meticulous Neapolitan tailoring tradition that permits a single visible 1mm stitch every 4mm. Subtler still, the thread is ton sur ton, color-matched to the leather to avoid the sort of sporty contrasts that can quickly become, as Terreni has it, “too showy.”
Why bother? The uncommon aesthetic, for one, but just as important is the knowledge gain required in order to grasp what makes it special. A machine would stitch together the six layers of a Parmigiani strap in a couple of minutes and in perfect but anonymous uniformity. Doing it punto a mano takes 10 times longer, but the result has the hand of humanity all over it.
Translating a tailoring technique, where the materials are softer and more easily manipulated, into watch-strap creation took not just time but an appetite for the process of trial and error. The teams pushed methodically through 10 prototyping phases before Terreni was happy that the result had the “desired balance of flexibility, precision, durability, and consistency” he wanted.
More than that, his ambition was to give exquisite, arcane craftsmanship every opportunity to come to the fore. In place of one machine rat-a-tat-tatting, there are now five artisans behind the crafting of each strap.
Terreni, who has been careful to protect the use of the technique for his straps, seems delighted when I admit I’d not spotted it when he first showed me the watches. “I like that you didn’t notice,” he says. “We looked for elements that are not to be showed off, to be there without being there.”
These “second-degree” details, as he calls them, will appeal to the style nerd’s obsession with understanding exactly what sets one piece apart from the next. “Real elegance is not to be shown; it is much more intimate, educated, and not loud at all,” he says. “Private luxury has always been there and will always be there.”
