The Datograph Perpetual turned twenty this year, and A. Lange & Söhne has marked the date not with a new complication but with a case-and-bracelet combination it has largely left alone for a generation. Reference 410.136E is a limited edition of 50 pieces in 950 platinum, and it comes on a solid platinum bracelet — the detail that sets it apart from the rest of the current Datograph Perpetual line, which is sold on straps.
A bracelet Lange stopped making
An integrated metal bracelet is not the house style at Glashütte, where the straps and pin buckles are part of the understatement. The brand did once offer bracelets, supplied by the German jeweller Wellendorff, on a handful of references, and 410.136E reaches back to that idea rather than inventing a new one. The bracelet is platinum throughout, tapering into a folding clasp engraved with the Lange name, and it is the single feature that makes this anniversary piece read differently on the wrist from the strap versions it otherwise matches.
The case and dial
The case is 41mm across and 13.5mm thick, in 950 platinum, with sapphire crystals front and back. The dial is solid silver finished in glossy black, with rhodium-plated sub-counters that keep the registers legible against the dark ground. In place of applied markers, the watch carries 11 baguette-cut diamonds — about 0.13 carats in total — set at the hours around the chapter ring. It is a restrained use of stones by the standards of a diamond-set watch: they mark time rather than crowd the dial, and the outsize date at twelve, the day/night indication paired with the moon phase at nine, and the month-and-leap-year display at three are all left to do their work.
The movement is unchanged — and that is the point
Behind the caseback is the hand-wound calibre L952.1, the movement that has defined this watch since 2006. It runs 556 parts across 45 jewels at 18,000 vibrations per hour, with a 36-hour power reserve, and it combines a flyback chronograph with a perpetual calendar, the outsize date and the moon phase. Lange did not touch it for the anniversary, and there was no reason to: the L952.1 remains one of the few movements to put a column-wheel flyback chronograph and a full perpetual calendar under one hand-finished caliber, and the appeal of 410.136E is the housing, not a rework of the mechanics.
Price and availability
A. Lange & Söhne is building the reference to order, 50 pieces in all, and lists the price on request rather than publishing a figure. For a platinum Datograph Perpetual on a platinum bracelet with baguette diamonds, that places it firmly at the top of the collection. The more interesting signal is what it says about Lange's relationship with its own past: a brand that rarely does bracelets, and almost never diamonds, has chosen to mark a twentieth anniversary by quietly doing both.
Sources: Monochrome Watches and WatchTime.
