6595 Blancpain Complete Calendar Moonphase

So you’ve been watching the fall auctions and standout Rolex 6062 lots, pining. Some have used the headline ‘most beautiful Rolex ever made’. But let’s say you don’t have the spare 2M CHF sitting around that one commanded a few days ago. Fret not, JCB and Blancpain’s best ever sequences of releases from the 90s have your back. This is the 6595 in platinum, the first of Blancpain’s six masterpieces released, colloquially called the Triple Calendar but more accurately known as the Complete Calendar Moonphase. And it’s about as beautiful a watch as there’s ever been made.

It’s hard to describe the 6595 without starting at the fact that this watch represents a resurrection arc for the whole Swiss industry. JCB was eager out of the gate to decry quartz and state that Blancpain would never make anything but mechanical. Right alongside AP’s 5548 perpetual calendar, this 6595 heralded in the modern era, where watches are objects of art, luxury, and self-expression, not necessity. Blancpain lit the flame again through complication, marketing mechanical as an art form. To quote JCB, ‘I didn’t want to relaunch Blancpain solely with hours and minutes watches.’ At its release in 1983, this was the smallest and thinnest complete calendar moonphase calibre ever created, just 4.9mm tall. Famously, Philippe Stern wrote JCB to congratulate him after this launch. That’s like having David Gilmour tell you you’re pretty good at this guitar thing.

Speak of guitar, Don McLean owns one, in the most unlikely and excellent pairing in watch history. It’s not hard to see why he likes it: the masterpieces unite everything most of us love in watches: daring, complication, slender proportions, and neo-classic design cues (just look at that crescent date pointer). And, somehow, it will do all that for less than 1/100th the ask of a 6062 today. Even in platinum, these trade hands below 20K today. For those with slightly more delicate wrists, neo Blancpain really is the value buy of the century at the moment. I can remember saying the same thing about the Fifty Fathoms nearly a decade ago. Keep it between us, please. To end on a tangent, isn’t it kind of lovely that Blancpain’s two most famed offerings ever are a 41mm technical military-issued diver and suite of high complications in 34mm ultra-thin precious metal cases? More range than Adele at Le Brassus.

This example is worn but not abused. The case is sporting light to moderate surface wear commensurate with a few years of daily wrist time, but no serious bashes or gouges visible. It comes as watch only from a well-regarded retailer in Japan.