On Vacheron Constantin’s Grand Lady Kalla, checking the time can begin at the wrist or at the end of a necklace. The coloured-stone interpretations unveiled in 2025 make this flexibility central to their design, placing rubies, sapphires and emeralds within an arrangement of diamonds, pearls and polished beads.
Each version comprises four elements: a watch, a jewel piece, a three-row rivière-style bracelet and a long sautoir. Hidden locking mechanisms allow the watch and jewel piece to exchange places without tools. The bracelet can carry a dial or a coloured gemstone centre, while the necklace becomes either a pendant watch or a tasselled jewel.
The change also shifts the balance of the composition. Rectangular stones give the bracelet its measured rhythm; the rounded Akoya pearls soften the line of the sautoir. Blue chalcedony accompanies sapphires, pink chalcedony joins rubies, and chrysoprase adds a lighter green to the emerald version. Colour continues through the necklace rather than stopping at its centre.
Across the watch, bracelet and jewel piece, emerald-cut stones emphasise the design’s Art Deco geometry. The centre of the jewel piece offers a different treatment: a sugarloaf-cut gem, its polished sides rising to a soft point. The setting contains a discreet signature, with claws shaped as branches of the Maltese Cross forming the house’s emblem where four stones meet.
The watch itself is powered by the quartz Calibre 1212, with the crown concealed beneath the stones. Its ability to move onto a necklace recalls an earlier way of wearing time, when a pendant could be lifted gently to read the dial.
That gesture has a place in Vacheron Constantin’s own women’s watchmaking history. Its private collection includes a multicoloured gem-set creation from 1924 that converts from pendant to brooch. Grand Lady Kalla carries that interest in adaptable jewellery into a design whose character changes with the way it is worn.
