Relaunched in 2020, Frederique Constant’s Highlife collection is methodically continuing its inventory of watchmaking complications. After the worldtimer, the chronograph and the perpetual calendar, the Geneva house adds a moon phase to the list with the Highlife Moonphase Date Manufacture — a piece that sums up the brand’s philosophy fairly well: a carefully made complication, an in-house movement, and a price that remains, by the standards of the sector, remarkably restrained.
The 39 mm steel case comes in two versions, each offered with two interchangeable straps — blue Saffiano leather and a five-link steel bracelet — for a piece that claims elegance and sportiness in equal measure. The dial, available in rosé champagne or midnight blue, plays the realism card for the moon display at 6 o’clock, with a play of grey shades meant to render the relief and shadowed areas of the lunar surface rather than a simple stylised disc.
The heart of the matter nonetheless remains mechanical: the FC-716 manufacture movement, designed and assembled in Geneva, offers a generous 72-hour power reserve thanks to a mainspring in a new alloy, housed in an enlarged and redesigned barrel. A technical choice that reflects a desire for greater autonomy, an argument increasingly sought by a clientele used to not winding their watch every day.
Frederique Constant finally backs its proposition with an extended five-year warranty — a rare duration in this price segment which, according to the house, reflects its confidence in the reliability of its new timepiece. At €4,495, the Highlife Moonphase Date Manufacture sits in a price territory where few manufactures offer a complication in an in-house movement, playing precisely on this gap between watchmaking ambition and relative accessibility.
Frederique Constant’s wager since its creation has always been to democratise complications generally reserved for more prestigious houses, without ever yielding on the demands of the manufacture movement. The Highlife Moonphase Date confirms this line: a serious moon, a price no less so, in a case that also knows how to be forgotten in daily wear.
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