During the second half of 2023, Louis Erard debuted a new three-watch set collaboration series with Alain Silberstein in khaki green, including a new regulator-style tourbillon model. I don’t believe the khaki green Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Le Regulateur Tourbillon was sold by itself. Rather, you needed to purchase the three-watch “tryptique” set in order to get the tourbillon. The upside was that if you did math, the three watches appeared to be a good value at 22,000 Swiss Francs for the lot. Certainly an interesting business move for Louis Erard. The next Tourbillon pieces will also be limited editions, but this time, they’ll be sold without the requirement that you purchase other watches at the same time. For 2024, Louis Erard and Alain Silberstein will return with new versions of the Le Regulateur Tourbillon, but this highly limited series came out at the end of 2023 for Louis Erard’s retail partner in the Middle East — the major retailer and organizer of Dubai Watch Week, Ahmed  Seddiqi & Sons. As a very small limited-edition series, the pictured “Seddiqi Edition” watch is a version of the Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Le Régulateur Tourbillon Black (there will be a few slightly different dial versions) done especially for the Seddiqi, with a primarily blue, black, and red dial.

For some people, these new Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein collaboration Le Regulateur Tourbillon watches are a welcome return to more tourbillon designs by Alain Silberstein. In the early 2000s, under his own brand name, Silberstein was a bit more prolific with tourbillon watches. In more recent times, all of the tourbillon-based timepieces he has been associated with have been very high-priced exotics from other brands (for example, there is the Alain Silberstein x Kross Studios Lotus Central Tourbillon watch). Indeed, Louis Erard is not a pure Alain Silberstein brand, but the ongoing collaboration between Silberstein and Louis Erard is actually pretty close to his own brand, in some ways. The cases and dials are all unique for Silberstein and look nice like other Louis Erard products. Louis Erard just produces and sells them. For the most part, these are Alain Silberstein-designed products, as I understand it.

Another reason people are excited about this tourbillon is that it is probably the most high-profile use of the inexpensive but virtually 100% Swiss Made BCP tourbillon. I first reviewed this movement in the BA111OD Tourbillon, which is where I believe it debuted. That is still probably the least expensive Swiss Made Tourbillon watch on the market. While this Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Le Regulateur Black watch is more expensive than the BA111OD Tourbillon, it is still well below recent historic prices for tourbillon watches. In this watch, the movement is known as the caliber BCP T02, and it has a slightly different configuration in order to provide a regulator-style display with a central minutes hand and a subsidiary dial for the hours. Seconds are indicated via the spinning 60-second tourbillon.

BCP’s tourbillon movement is pretty solid. It isn’t terribly complicated nor are the tourbillon parts lavished with loads of hand decoration. Rather, years of development in tourbillons have allowed for so many best practices that relatively industrialized tourbillon movements are easily capable. That is why brands like Louis Erard can offer a fully Swiss Made tourbillon (far more of the parts are made in Switzerland than the legal requirement) at prices that just a few years ago were not possible, especially for brands like Louis Erard that do not produce their own movements.

The caliber BCP T02 mechanical movement is manually wound with a handsome 100 hours (about four days) of power reserve, operating at 3Hz. The movement is rather robust in its architecture, valuing stability and operation over small size and pure aesthetics. If there were a workhorse Swiss tourbillon movement, this might be it. Note that for this tourbillon version of Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein watches, the crown design is different. Knotches in the crown are added around the periphery to make manually winding the movement more comfortable on your fingers. The standard crown for this case design is smooth, and more slippery. It is suitable for automatic movements, and it is nice to see that Louis Erard and Alain Silberstein considered such important details when creating this tourbillon watch.

Once again, in titanium (mixed use of grade 2 and grade 5 for different parts of the case), the Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein Le Regulateur Tourbillon Black watch case is 40mm wide, 11.8mm thick, and has a 47mm long lug-to-lug distance. The case is water resistant to 100 meters, and there are flat sapphire crystals over the caseback and dial. Don’t forget that the titanium lugs articulate with the connected strap, in order to provide more wearing comfort as it wraps around your wrist. These Louis Erard x Alain Silberstien cases are very comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time. And that isn’t something always obvious about watches like this that are certainly a bit more exotic-looking (though still entirely practical).

Dial-wise, there is little here different than what people have come to expect from a tourbillon version of the work Alain Silberstein has done with Louis Erard. The parties seem to believe that the best approach is a more conservative one based on celebrating Silberstein’s legacy timepiece aesthetic. This means that the Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein relationship is less about constantly experimenting with new forms and themes. Rather, they are packaging a core Alain Silberstein aesthetic, and cleverly selling flavors of it. This can be done successfully for at least a few years before the market demands something fundamentally new.

Attached to the polished and sandblasted titanium case is a black nylon strap with a Velcro-style enclosure system. The strap merges the worlds of luxury, design, comfort, and leisure in an interesting way. I found these straps comfortable and fun, even though they are admittedly casual. That’s really a good way to comment on the dial and overall theme of this watch. With the exposed mechanics of a Swiss tourbillon, this is hardly a basic timepiece. But with the legible, colorful, and playful dial, along with the more architectural (versus classic) case, this is a luxury watch very intent on not taking itself too seriously. Louis Erard will produce a few different limited edition versions of the Alain Silberstein Le Regulateur Tourbillon Black watch. The pictured reference 89356TT12.BTT82 version has a blue minute scale ring along with predominantly red colors in addition to black. Price for each in this limited edition of 10 is about 70,000 AED. Future versions of this model, similarly specced, will be priced at about 15,900 Swiss Francs. Learn more at the Louis Erard website here.