Should this watch have been offered in steel? It would have been a less expensive watch but it also would have been a completely different one; everything from the appearance of the metal to the effect of the finishing methods, to the overall sense of appealing but not overwhelming mass that this watch has in white gold, would be absent in steel. (This is not to say that the Overseas Ultra-Thin would be a bad watch in steel – very likely it wouldn’t be – but it’s worth pointing out that it would be a very different watch.) Is it too expensive? The question is prima facie absurd – of course it’s too expensive, too expensive by half, and by any rational measure, you should take one look at the price tag, think of all the other watches you could get for nearly sixty thousand dollars, and say to yourself, “Well, this is nature’s way of saying, ‘don’t touch.'” (To be fair, however, the AP Jumbo in rose gold, the closest thing I can think of to the VC Overseas Ultra-Thin, with exactly the same movement but for the date guichet, is almost exactly the same price.)
The only problem with that, is that any other watch wouldn’t be this watch, and if you want this watch – with its all-too-rare ability to seem both wonderfully simple without being simplistic; with all its design purity; with all its capacity to remind you just how satisfyingly right a few components standing in perfect harmony to each other can be – it’s going to cost you, more or less, $55,700 dollars.
It’s a little maddening that less costs so much more, but at least in this case you can take more than solace in the fact that less really is more.