Trilobe

Parisian independent watch brand built around a fundamental conceptual reversal. For seven centuries, time was frozen beneath rotating hands. Trilobe liberates it: three rotating rings rush forward, carrying the scales of time — the largest for hours, the median for minutes, the smallest for seconds. No hands, no preconceived notions. The three rings turn counterclockwise — an opposite stance from traditional watchmaking. The 'trilobe' motif — an ornamental pattern of three circular arcs — is an architectural form echoing the three pillars of time: Hours, Minutes, Seconds. Timeless and universal, it gives the brand its name and becomes the new indicator of time.

The skeleton of the seconds disc draws on the rose window of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — a 'radiant' Gothic architecture designed to flood the interior with light, no other building had been so bright before its construction. The X-Centric automatic movement powers the collections, blending traditional Swiss watchmaking with an unprecedented vision. The first collection — Les Matinaux — was inspired by poet René Char and his poetry collection of the same name: three circles, five variations. Later collections include Une Folie de Plus (UFJR), the flagship asymmetric model; Nuit Fantastique (four parts, three in permanent rotation); and Une Seconde de Plus. A touch of poetry and eccentricity on the wrist. 'An urgent invitation to take your time. Time. Liberated.'

Three years after quietly deciding to build its own workshop, Trilobe opened a full manufacture in Paris's Opéra district — steps from where Breguet, Le Roy, and Berthoud once worked — and used it to launch the Trente-Deux in 2025, the house's first genuine sports watch and, more significantly, the debut platform for its first in-house movement, the Calibre X-Nihilo. Developed, prototyped, decorated, and assembled entirely in-house by a team of roughly ten watchmakers, the 218-component automatic solves a genuine engineering problem specific to Trilobe's open aesthetic: consolidating most of the movement beneath an unusually large, self-supporting monolithic bridge in order to keep the balance spring isolated and fully visible, a construction founder and creative director Gautier Massonneau's team has called highly uncommon in watch design. Priced from €17,500 in steel to €35,500 in rose gold, the Trente-Deux expanded further in March 2026 with the bespoke Secret edition, whose dial is rendered as a made-to-measure star map capturing the exact sky, date, and location of a moment meaningful to the owner — turning each watch into a genuinely unique piece. Trilobe has been explicit that the new manufacture builds on, rather than replaces, its earlier X-Centric-powered collections, which the brand considers just as essential to its identity; the workshop itself is now open for visits from collectors and partners, a rare degree of transparency for a house still not yet a decade old.