“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s words from The Little Prince reflected his awareness of the stars in his own life. The pioneering French aviator and author piloted airmail planes across the Sahara and the South Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s, when pilots navigated primarily by a compass, a watch, and the sky above them.
IWC Schaffhausen has leveraged this history since 2006, when it began collaborating with Saint-Exupéry’s descendants. Over the past 20 years, this has resulted in a series of Le Petit Prince special editions, museum collaborations, and charity initiatives through the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Youth Foundation. It is easy to recognise the watches: they have deep blue dials with sunray finishes, gold-plated hands, and an engraving of the prince on his asteroid on the back.
To mark both the 20th anniversary of that collaboration and 90 years of IWC Pilot’s Watches, the manufacture has introduced a new collection of Le Petit Prince watches.
There are five anniversary editions of existing Pilot’s Watches: a Mark XX in 5N gold, a Mark XX in stainless steel, two stainless steel chronographs in 43mm and 41mm, and a Pilot’s Watch Automatic 36. Also featured in the collection is the first Le Petit Prince chronograph made of white ceramic, as well as the first Portofino in this series, in which the prince stands on the moon of the day-and-night display.
The collection’s standout is the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet—one of the most important launches this year. Perpetual calendars are among the most intricate complications in high watchmaking, with a major drawback: they cannot be set backwards. Accidental date advancement requires corrective action month by month or returning the watch to the manufacture.
The ProSet modifies that constraint. Engineered from scratch for both forward and backward adjustments, the calendar features a fully gear-driven architecture with multiple functional layers and flexible, retractable fingers that enable the wearer to adjust the date, day, month, and year in either direction using a single crown.
There are no corrector pushers. The mechanism is controlled by a program wheel that encodes the length of each month through all its elevations, and a leap-year wheel that completes one revolution every four years.
Additionally, the moon phase has been refined further. IWC’s Double Moon display, showing the phase from both hemispheres, now diverges from the moon’s true orbit by just one day every 1,040 years—a significant improvement over the brand’s previous standard and among the most precise moon-phase indicators on the market.
To create the intricate geometries required by this architecture, IWC relied extensively on LIGA, a micro-structuring process adapted from semiconductor production that combines lithography with electroforming. With this technique, multiple layers of functionality can be integrated into a single part, and shapes can be achieved with unprecedented precision.
The calendar module is housed within IWC’s new 82665 calibre, equipped with a silicon hairspring and a nickel-phosphorus escapement. The Pellaton bidirectional winding system uses zirconium oxide ceramic for the wheels and the click components that can withstand extreme stress.
The Le Petit Prince ProSet is available in two versions, each protected by several patent applications. The first watch has a 43-mm white zirconium oxide ceramic case with a white rubber strap, a gradient deep blue dial, white printed numerals, and rhodium-plated hands. In the second version, the 42-mm stainless steel case is paired with a five-link bracelet with rhodium-plated appliques and includes an extra blue rubber strap that can be changed using IWC’s EasX-Change system without tools. In both models, gold-plated medallions of the prince on his asteroid are embedded in the rotor and visible through the sapphire case back.
Saint-Exupéry wrote that the stars guide travellers. Eighty years later, his Little Prince plays the same role here—a small figure on the winding rotor, pointing the wearer towards what matters rather than what clamours for attention.
