A new collaboration for CORUM, which has teamed up with Label Noir to manufacture a unique timepiece dedicated to the renowned Macau Master of Time Event. By partnering with Label Noir, the Swiss watchmaking company located in La Chaux-de-Fonds has given carte blanche to Label Noir’s creative team, which has plenty of practice!

The Bubble collection, and more specifically the emblematic CORUM Bubble 47 Central Tourbillon model, has been enhanced with the most distinctive features of the Genevabased customization brand Label Noir: black, acid green, textured finishes, grey and matte tones, in order to highlight its deeply contemporary essence.

This is the fruit of this collaboration: A watch design concentrate, loaded up with signatures,symbols and stories.

In the Year 2000, CORUM introduced the Bubble, an oversized wristwatch with an expanded glass. A so radical design that the timepiece has become a must-have of the new millennium. It bridges the gap between two universes, between watchmaking and pop culture.

Out of nowhere, The Bubble Collection is Severin Wunderman’s rendition of his own vision. The entrepreneur had just acquired Corum when he launched the Bubble. At that time, his first inspiration was technical: extreme diving watches, able to withstand abysmal pressures, pure engineering pieces topped with a thick glass dome.

Severin Wunderman has brought out the aesthetic power of this wrist bubble, turning it into a generous 47 mm diameter theater, an area for artistic experimentation, a lounge where Corum hosts its proms and invites other performers, graphic designers and artists. With a huge array of collaborations in the end.

Label Noir has applied all its expertise in colors and finishes to emphasize in its own way how to read the piece and make the Bubble a monument of contemporaneity. The move sounds normal, almost usual, but it’ s not. The effects are impressive. All the more so since the model chosen for this collaborative venture is a milestone piece, an obvious creation, a purely technical piece of fine watchmaking, featuring an (almost) traditional complication: Bubble Central Tourbillon.

An almost conventional complication, in fact, because this tourbillon, which features a traditional architecture, is brought back from the periphery to the center. And this sidestep turns the whole architecture of the movement and the display upside down: everything is reversed, from the mechanical show in the center highlighted by the Bubble’s dome, to the display – no hands, just indicators – around the edges.

Several versions of this central tourbillon have already been achieved in various materials, with the aim of anchoring this UFO in the traditional haute horlogerie’s world while playing with opposites, such as steel and blue, gold and black.

Label Noir went for a different approach. Very graphic finishes, deceptively minimalist, because the play of nuances is complex, with anthracite and argentic hues, matte finishes, bracelet (matte textured black rubber), case (grade 5 titanium treated with black ADLC), bezel (grade 5 titanium coated with satin black ADLC), right down to the plate. No longer an assembly of different parts, this watch is a whole: one continuous stripe with a bubble on top.

A few more dashes of steel to enhance the dial pattern, numerals and display discs, and to refocus the eyes on the central body, the beating heart, the tourbillon.

Finally, what must be read is highlighted with a few strokes of color contrast: the acid green, Label Noir’s signature – the hour-minute indicators, the dual mark and the strap stitching.