The women's watch that men keep asking for

In 2022, Claude Meylan entered a ladies’ watch in the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève: 31 millimetres, automatic, skeletonised, with not a single stone set. The Tortue Lady Blue Moon belongs to a family the Vallée de Joux house had started a few years earlier, and which it presents with a sentence that reads like a manifesto.

Since then the story has taken a turn that manifesto did not foresee. Men are asking for it, to wear themselves.

Before the Lady, the Tortue de Joux

Claude Meylan had a tortoise-shaped case before the Lady existed. The Tortue de Joux, at 40 millimetres, came first, and the Tortue models in that size are today skeleton watches with manual or automatic winding. To turn one into a ladies’ watch, it would have been enough to shrink it and set it with stones.

[…] all its expertise goes to show that a women’s watch is more than a round watch, resized and set with stones!

Claude Meylan, Tortue Lady Blue Moon press release, translated from the French

Claude Meylan started somewhere else, with what its female clients were telling it: a woman likes mechanics, and she wants a certain liveliness in her watch. The answer lies in a calibre the Lady shares with no other watch in the catalogue, the self-winding 7.75 CM 17. It was entirely rethought and drawn by the brand, and keeps the regulating organs of the ETA 2671 for their reliability.

A rotor dancing under the crystal

A curve runs across the watch from 11 o’clock to 4 o’clock. It carries the dial, a small polished disc with three Roman numerals, beneath blued dauphine hands. The movement opens onto the balance at 9 o’clock and its lever, which beat out the rhythm in plain view.

The happiest touch is at the bottom. The oscillating weight has been turned over and placed on the dial side, at 6 o’clock. It bears the same sunburst decoration as the 3 o’clock bridge, so the two answer each other like a pair of fans opening towards one another. And it moves with the slightest turn of the wrist, before the eyes of the woman wearing it, without her having to turn the watch over.

The case is steel, 31 millimetres across the middle and 11 thick, the crown capped with a cabochon, the strap in blue satin. The Blue Moon is listed in the brand’s catalogue at 4,500 Swiss francs.

I think this is one of the first times a brand has made a ladies’ watch that men ask for.

Pia de Chefdebien, sales manager at Claude Meylan, who initiated the development of the Tortue Lady Blue Moon, translated from the French

Faced with the enthusiasm the model stirred among the brand’s male clients, Claude Meylan chose to develop an identical model in 35 mm, a shrewd compromise between the 31 mm of the ladies’ watch and the 40 mm of the Tortue models already in the men’s collection. It is a phenomenon that reminds me of another tortoise-shaped watch, F.P.Journe’s celebrated Élégante. One might think this case shape was made for it.

What it tells us

The ladies’ watch has often been a jewel that tells the time, or a scaled-down version of a man’s watch. The Tortue Lady has its own movement and its own staging, and it owes them to female clients who were listened to.

Men now coming to ask for it in turn reverses the usual direction of travel.

Women’s watches are no longer automatically jewellery or reduced versions of men’s watches. When one of them is designed in earnest, it can in turn become the model for a man’s watch.

Sources: Claude Meylan, Tortue Lady Blue Moon press release; Claude Meylan, online catalogue (claudemeylan.ch), consulted on 6 October 2026; Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, watches in competition at the 2022 edition and the Tortue Lady Blue Moon and Tortue de Joux entries (gphg.org).