July 2019 – For the tenth consecutive year, Girard-Perregaux joined forces with the Ecole d’Arts Appliqués (EAA) – located in its home town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland – to draw upon the creativity of students specialised in engraving as part of their graduation project. This artistic endeavour, involving the complete decoration of a current Girard-Perregaux timepiece, was carried out under the direction of Jacques Rais, Head of the Engraving Department.
This annual graduation project focused on engraving aims to enhance a watch from the Girard-Perregaux collection by means of ornamentation on the movement as well as the dial. With this in mind and for the very first time, the three students specialised in engraving were invited to work on the exclusively feminine Cat’s Eye model.
Based on the famous “Flower Power” slogan – born out of the famous 1967 “summer of love” gathering in San Francisco, where the flower was the symbol of a peaceful ideology – each student was asked to create and develop an embellishment and a unique face for the Cat’s Eye. Their task involved transposing the theme into a feminine scenography. This creative work was jointly supervised by the Girard-Perregaux Product and Training team together with the EAA Engraving and Communication teams in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
The richness and variety of the designs and projects proposed to testify to the vitality of the engraving training course offered by EEA – La Chaux-de-Fonds, as well as to the creativity and determination of its youthful talents who perfectly interpreted the theme using a resolutely contemporary approach. On June 26th, to celebrate the completion of this project and to mark this significant moment in the artistic lives of these young graduates, Girard-Perregaux extended its congratulations by presenting each of them the Cat’s Eye piece through which they expressed their expertise over a period of more than nine months.
