A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Platinum Bracelet

A. Lange & Söhne has added a 950 platinum bracelet to the Datograph Perpetual, limited to 50 numbered pieces. The company will not publish a price. You ask, and they tell you.

The bracelet is the news. Lange built it in-house, five rows of platinum links closed with a push-button clasp, with no fine-adjustment mechanism of the kind fitted to the Odysseus. It is a return to the Wellendorff-style bracelets Lange offered in its early revival years, in gold and platinum, which added large sums to the price and sold in small numbers. Most of those were eventually melted down. The few that survive now trade at prices that sometimes rival the watch itself.

The dial carries eleven baguette-cut diamonds totalling 0.13 carats, set into a black 925 silver dial, restrained by the standards of gem-set watches. The case is 41mm across and 13.5mm thick in platinum, one of the densest metals used in watchmaking, which is why a platinum bracelet on a 41mm case is not a casual proposition to wear daily.

Underneath the jewelry is the L952.1, the movement that has defined the Datograph Perpetual since 2006: a flyback chronograph and instantaneous perpetual calendar in 556 components, 223 of them in the calendar mechanism alone, hand-finished with Glashütte ribbing and an engraved balance cock. Power reserve is 36 hours, short for a watch this complicated, which means the corrector pusher at 10 o'clock that resets all displays at once is not a luxury but a necessity.

Lange is reviving a chapter of its own history, built once with an outside jeweler and now built entirely in-house, and pricing it for the fifty people who already know what a Datograph Perpetual does.