Introducing Grail Watch 3: Trilobe Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night”
Wei Koh, the founder of Revolution and The Rake, is proud to unveil his third Grail Watch collaboration. Meet the Trilobe Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night”.
One of my favorite watches of 2021 was the Trilobe Nuit Fantastique Secret. The brand allows customers to customize the dial with a depiction of the night sky from a location, date, and time of their choosing. As you can imagine, this could make for an incredibly meaningful gift or commemorative piece for one’s own collection. But during Watches and Wonders 2022 in Geneva, the folks from Trilobe showed us the Une Folle Journée. This beautiful new watch featured eccentric rotating and floating rings. The brand has now teamed up with Wei Koh’s Grail Watch to create the Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night”.
Trilobe Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night”
Une Folle Soirée translates into “A Wild Night”, and according to Trilobe, it has been inspired by the Van Morrison song of the same name. When Wei Koh saw Trilobe’s new model for 2022, he was impressed by the playful watch with its floating discs. It reminded him of three UFOs in a coordinated flight pattern landing on the surface of a planet. He explains, “I knew immediately that I would love to see this featuring a maximum light show when the watch was in an ambient or dark setting.”
A lume party
And that’s exactly what happened. Trilobe’s founder Gautier Massonneau applied luminous material to both the numerals on the discs and edges of the base plate. It perfectly played into the UFO theme that Koh had in mind for the Grail Watch × Trilobe collaboration. The image below shows the picture that he had in his head when he came up with the concept of the spaceship armada landing.
According to Massonneau, it was everything but an easy task to execute the lume correctly. It needed to be applied with the utmost care as the clearance to the base plate from the rotating wheels is minimal.
A superdome of sapphire and titanium
The Une Folle Soirée measures a modest 40.5mm in diameter and features a Grade 5 titanium case. In addition to its lightness and corrosion resistance, Grade 5 titanium allows for a nice polish, unlike Grade 2.
The watch measures 17.8mm thick, which sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that it has an incredibly domed shape. Therefore, this measurement only applies to the very center of the crystal.
How to read the time
As you’ve noticed in the photos, the Trilobe watch doesn’t indicate the time in the usual way. There is one ring for hours (the outer ring), another for minutes (the middle ring), and a third for seconds (the innermost ring). A fixed red pointer at 6 o’clock indicates the current time.
An X-Centric engine
All of this is powered by the self-winding X-Centric movement. This caliber powers all of Trilobe’s watches, including this new Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night”. It was developed with the help of Jean-François Mojon of Chronode, who is also behind MB&F’s Legacy Machine No.1. Further development of the X-Centric movement was performed together with Le Cercle des Horlogers, specialists in complications.
Tungsten carbide micro-rotor
The X-Centric has a micro-rotor made of tungsten carbide and a 4Hz frequency with enough torque to drive the discs on the dial side. The movement has a high level of grained finishing and bevels on its anthracite bridges and base plate. Furthermore, it fills the sapphire exhibition window nicely while requiring a case no larger than 41mm.
Price and availability
Only 25 pieces of the Trilobe Une Folle Soirée “Wild Night” will be available. The watch has just launched today and retails for €22,000. For more information, visit the Grail Watch website.
