BVLGARI OCTO Limited Edition

Octo’s seductive power lies in its sophistication. Avoiding simplistic approaches and preconceived ideas, this watch is the signature of a remarkable, unusual, and meticulous personality that embraces the complementary sides of its dual nature. In a day and age that is searching for understanding, values and meaning, this watch asserts its studied complexity. It draws on its mixed background to provide a structured measurement and display of passing time, the better to appreciate, save, or notice it. The Octo’s nature derives from its roots. The offspring of a marriage of Italian creativity and Swiss precision, it borrows the best of both worlds to take the middle road between sensuousness and exactness. The Octo has become a mainstay in the watch collections of Bvlgari, a house known far and wide for its daring and fine-jewellery expertise. The watch is both a precision timepiece and an architectural creation that pays lively tribute to Italian creative genius.

Italian architecture channels the art of designing spaces and structures to make life pleasant; it achieves this by wedding utility to beauty, rationalism to aestheticism and functionality to pleasure. It laid the foundations for modern urban civilisations. Leonardo da Vinci, that prolific inventor who was so ahead of his time, let the technology of his day guide him. Aided by a scholarly culture in which passion had its rightful place, he invented the most visionary of solutions. His research enabled him to combine efficiency with beauty. Geometry and precision gave birth to perfection. The Octo watch is true to these teachings, without neglecting one of the ingredients of seduction: surprise. One yet many, accurate yet sensuous, the Octo plays on paradoxes and contrasts to better show off its various facets. It appears as a built edifice, with two sides. One side is a finely fashioned case with a hundred and ten different facets for a thousand surprises. So the eye wanders over the ridges and flat surfaces, discovering how the material was worked, cut from a solid piece, the sparkling and more satiny surfaces. Metal in all its glory. Whether gold or steel, the material expresses and reveals itself. In the heart of the Swiss Jura, the Saignelégier craftsmen who make the cases and bracelets carry on tradition, repeating the age-old meticulous, precise motions to create the Octo’s casing, a tour de force of both design and manufacture. Its remarkable shape is unlike any other in the world of fine watchmaking, since the watch is octagonal (hence “Octo”) and crowned with a round bezel.

The Octo continues the ancient quest of bringing together forms as an aid in the search for perfection and harmony: a studied process that gives it its unique character. On another side, in much the same way as an entrance hall orders the arrangement of the rooms and gives an overview of how they are organised, the Octo’s octagonal dial opening draws the eye further into the structure: like the gates of Rome giving entry to the Eternal City built on its seven hills. Every facet of the Octo watch points the way to the dials’ extremely refined features, created by the same pursuit of simplicity and flawlessness wrought through generations of fine workmanship and sophistication.