SJX Watches
Hands On: Blancpain Lady B
The charming and compact Lady B extends Blancpain’s collection of elegant ladies watches while upholding the brand’s longstanding commitment to mechanical calibres. At just 19 mm in size and almost spherical in form, the Lady B contains an upmarket automatic movement that transcends the quartz-powered norms for this segment of watchmaking. Initial thoughts The Lady B is the spiritual successor to the Ladybird Bullet, which introduced the world’s smallest round mechanical movement when it debuted 70 years ago under the leadership of Betty Fiechter, the first woman to lead a major Swiss watch brand. The “round” qualifier is important because the smallest mechanical movement — then, as now — was the Jaeger-LeCoultre cal. 101, which is still in production but in extremely limited numbers, and reserved for high jewellery collections. The Lady B (left) with the original Ladybird Bullet from 1956 The Lady B is larger than the vintage Bullet, but at just 19 mm it’s still small enough that the size is the main point of intrigue. The watch is almost spherical being 13 mm thick, but rather than feeling too thick this aspect gives the watch a charming bead-like feel similar to the original Bullet. The spherical feel is completed by the absence of conventional lugs; the Lady B instead features a pass-through channel for a selection of interchangeable straps. This hypothetically allows multiple Lady B’s to be “stacked” on the same strap for a jewellery-like look, b...
