In 1985, during the midst of the quartz crisis, IWC set out to create what would be its first “grande complication” wristwatch and one of the world’s most complicated timepieces: a wristwatch featuring a perpetual calendar, a chronograph, and a minute repeater. A team of watchmakers and engineers was assembled to create IWC’s grande complication, including two young heralds of complicated horology, Dominic Renaud and Giulio Papi (today, they are behind some of Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille’s most complicated movements). After five years of painstaking development and 12 individual patents, this horological masterpiece was officially presented at the Basel fair in 1990. Reportedly, by the end of Basel in 1990, the company had enough order requests for the next seven years. Each of the 659 individual components were manufactured and assembled in house, and power 18 functions and complications: hour, minute and seconds displays, moon phase, month, day and date displays, perpetual calendar, indication of year, decade, century and millennium, chronograph seconds counter, chronograph minutes counter, chronograph hours counter, minute repeater, quarter repeater and hour repeater.

Released in several different case materials and dial iterations over the following two decades, with limited examples produced each year. This pristine example from 2008 is accompanied with its original boxes and paperwork, and remains preserved in immaculate original condition.