On the back of the new M.A.D.3, a sentence reveals itself each time the watch is wound, engraved to be read in the rhythm of the gesture rather than just once: “It is easy enough to please others, far harder to be proud of oneself.” It is signed by Vincent Calabrese, the 82-year-old independent watchmaker to whom MB&F dedicates this third chapter of its M.A.D.Editions collection, and it sums up on its own an entire career spent away from consensus.
A watchmaker who always went his own way
Co-founder in 1985 of the AHCI, the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants, alongside Svend Andersen, Vincent Calabrese is one of those figures who shaped contemporary independent watchmaking without ever seeking the recognition of the great established Maisons. Among other achievements, he conceived the Golden Bridge movement for Corum and filed more than forty patents over five decades devoted to wandering-hour displays, tourbillons and mechanisms that refuse the expected solutions. His place within the M.A.D.Editions universe, imagined by Maximilian Büsser not as a watch brand with a fixed vocabulary but as a publishing house bringing together singular “authors”, was therefore almost self-evident. After the M.A.D.1 signed by Büsser himself and the M.A.D.2 drawn by Eric Giroud, the M.A.D.3 bears the mark of Calabrese.
Time that glides rather than jumps
The heart of the new piece revisits a complication Calabrese had developed for his Baladin watch, launched in 1989: where the traditional jumping hour changes numeral all at once, a movement he considered too abrupt to convey the real sensation of passing time, his mechanism lets the hour numeral glide gradually across the dial while the minutes continue their course. Reproducing this artisanal mechanism on a larger scale was no simple matter: the M.A.D.Editions technical teams had to entirely rethink the wandering-hours module on the basis of the Swiss made La Joux-Perret G111 calibre, reworking energy management, amplitude control and the stability of the power reserve, now set at 55 hours, while preserving the fluidity that gave the original Baladin its charm.
An object, not a reissue
Housed in a 40 mm stainless steel case, the M.A.D.3 adopts the collection’s aesthetic codes: floating lugs, domed sapphire crystals front and back, a sapphire minute ring, and Super-LumiNova set beneath the transparent elements. It is offered in two colourways inspired by Calabrese’s own creations, both priced at 2,900 Swiss francs excluding tax: a pink version reserved for collectors of the MB&F Tribe and its long-standing partners, and a blue version available by ballot.
More than an exercise in horological nostalgia, this third M.A.D.Editions piece works as a portrait in negative: that of a man who spent his life demonstrating that there is always another way of doing things, even when nobody asked him to.
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