The Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Complete Calendar With Moonphase

The complete calendar is a complication that offers a lot of visual razzle-dazzle for not (usually) a whole heck of a lot more money than a simple watch with a simple date window. In the minds of most enthusiasts, the hierarchy of calendar complications is simple: You have the simple calendar, the annual calendar, and the perpetual calendar. The simple calendar is — well, simple. You have a date wheel, numbered from one to 31, which is advanced once per day — and you don’t have to do anything except at the end of months with 30 days or less, of which there are five in the year.
The old mnemonic rhyme for this is:
“Thirty Days, Hath September 
April, June, And November 
All The Rest Have Thirty-One”
… and then you come in sotto voce with, ” …except for February, which has 28 days except in a Leap Year, when it has 29, except for the end of a century when you skip a Leap Year.”
For most of our natural lives, however, a simple calendar will do well enough. The actual hierarchy of calendars has a couple in between the simple calendar and the perpetual calendar. These are the triple calendar and the so-called “complete calendar.”
The triple calendar is a simple calendar mechanically, but with the addition of a window showing the day of the week, and the month. Usually, the date is shown with a hand pointing to numbers one through 31 around the dial, and with two windows showing the day of the week and the month. The complete calendar is a triple calendar but with the addition of a moonphase complication, and while it requires a little more fiddling than the annual or perpetual calendar, it is both very easy to live with, and very entertaining to look at. You only have to adjust the date five times a year (and at a period of longer intervals, the moonphase, depending on the watch and the precision of its moonphase complication).
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-1166277 size-full" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022_12_16_AWAW_Vacheron-Constantin-Tradtionnelle_01.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle" width="1400" height="908" />
Triple and complete calendars are fairly rare these days. While some of the more popular collectible vintage watches are complete calendars, including the Rolex references 6162 and 8171, and the Omega “Cosmic” model (launched in 1947), and while there are third-party movement solutions for complete calendar and complete calendar chronograph watches, most traditional luxury watch brands don’t have triple or complete calendars in their catalogs at all, preferring to invest in producing annual and perpetual calendars instead.
This might come as a bit of a surprise to James Bond fans who associate the spy with Rolex or Omega, but the complete calendar actually makes an appearance in one of the Fleming novels — From Russia With Love, in which the assassin “Red” Grant is said to wear, ” … a bulky gold wristwatch on a well-used brown crocodile strap. It was a Girard-Perregaux model designed for people who like gadgets, and it had a sweep second-hand and two little windows in the face to tell the day of the month, and the month, and the phase of the moon” — an allusion to the fact that in addition to being the chief killer for SMERSH, Grant was also a serial killer who felt the urge to shed blood every full moon.
Of the so-called “Big Three” Swiss luxury brands — Patek, Vacheron, and Audemars Piguet — Vacheron is the only company that still produces complete calendar watches. Rolex has not produced the complication in many years, and in the current collection, the closest thing is the Cellini moonphase, which is a <a href="https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/cellini.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch with moonphase and pointer date</a>. Jaeger-LeCoultre, by contrast, has a number of different complete calendars, and complete calendar chronograph, watches in its Master collection (as does Baume et Mercier) — and then, of course, there is <a href="../watches/vacheron-constantin/">Vacheron Constantin</a>, which offers the most luxurious version of the complete calendar currently available, as well as a triple calendar in the Les Historiques collection.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-1166275 size-full" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022_12_16_AWAW_Vacheron-Constantin-Tradtionnelle_02.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle" width="1400" height="908" />
The Traditionnelle Complete Calendar has been offered in several different metals and configurations in recent years, including an open dial model, but the pink gold reference 4010T is probably the most classically oriented as well as the most luxurious version. At 41mm, it’s slightly larger than some of the other calendar models from Vacheron but only just — the Fifty-Six Complete Calendar and the Les Historiques Triple Calendar (currently only available in steel) are both 40mm watches.
The movement is the in-house automatic caliber 2460, which, with different additional complications or on its own, can be found in a number of Vacheron Constantin watches. It’s, in turn, based on the caliber 2450, which, when that movement was introduced in 2007, was actually the first in-house automatic caliber from Vacheron — prior to that period, Vacheron, like virtually all fine watchmaking brands, including Patek and Audemars Piguet, took advantage of the network of movement suppliers who specialized in complicated watchmaking in the Vallée de Joux (especially Jaeger-LeCoultre) so you’re getting a modern movement which, at the same time, has been around long enough to look and feel very much like a piece of classic Swiss fine watchmaking.
There’s another piece of tradition on the movement as well, in addition to the fine finishing: the Poinçon de Genève, or Geneva Seal, a hallmark applied to movements that are made in the city and canton of Geneva, and which meet certain quality requirements.
Vacheron is one of the very few brands left to use the Seal (Patek Philippe raised a ruckus among collectors when it abandoned the Geneva Seal in 2013 in favor of its own internal quality certification; currently, brands using the Geneva Seal for at least some of their production include Chopard and Cartier). Some of the requirements are pretty arcane — the fact that cheap wire springs are forbidden makes intuitive sense, but most collectors, even movement nerds, may struggle to understand why the escapement has to include solid bankings for the lever rather than moveable and adjustable banking pins (the former are certainly harder to make and adjust). Still, it’s a wonderful and increasingly rare direct connection to a very long tradition in Swiss watchmaking in general, and Genevan horology in particular — the first “enabling statue” establishing the Seal under the supervision of the Genevan school of watchmaking was set out in 1886.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-1166276 size-full" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022_12_16_AWAW_Vacheron-Constantin-Tradtionnelle_03.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle" width="1400" height="908" />
There are watches that stun and amaze through innovation and through overt appeals to a taste for modernity and even novelty. The <a href="../watches/vacheron-constantin/vacheron-constantin-traditionnelle/">Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle</a>, in pink gold, reference 4010T, is not one of them. It is, instead, an exercise, if not in nostalgia, then in undiluted tradition. There are times when what you want is the titillation of a new discovery, but there are also times when you want the reassurance of not only the familiar but of a long line of unobtrusive but definite excellence. There is an analogy in fine dining, I suppose — post-modern molecular fine dining (which, to be honest, is already passé) is one thing, but sometimes you don’t want a dish of dirt from the unpolluted slopes of Scandanavian mountains topped with sea-foam gelee and a wafer of dehydrated, deep-fried codfish swim bladder — you want a Dover sole meunière, fileted tableside, without any attempts to be cute on the part of the kitchen.
To me, that’s what this watch is — a lovely, solid, and definitive demonstration that classics are classics for a reason.
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Vacheron Constantin

Written By

Jack Forster

WatchBox Global Editorial Director Jack Forster has been fascinated by every aspect of watches, clocks, and watchmaking for his entire life. He began systematically studying and learning about watches over 20 years ago, and during the first explosion of watch enthusiast forums, he became a moderator on thepurists.com. Jack became a full-time watch writer in 2007, when he joined Revolution Magazine, first as group technical and features editor, and then as editor in chief of Revolution Magazine USA. He joined the enthusiast website Hodinkee in 2015 as managing editor and then as Editor in Chief. In 2022, Jack joined WatchBox as the Global Editorial Director. He is the author of Cartier Time Art: Mechanics of Passion, and has written about watches, and other subjects, for many other venues including CNN, American Express Departures, and Vanity Fair.

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