4 Stunning Dress Watches That Deserve a Spot on Every Collector’s Wish List

Welcome to Watch Guy Watches, GQ’s monthly curation of high-end timepieces for the true watch nerds among us. This September, Jaeger-LeCoultre delivers a subtle update to a beloved model; Breguet continues its 250th-birthday celebration; Lange delivers a stunning dress watch; and Grand Seiko quietly drops what may be its best-looking mechanical timepiece in years.

Browse through the inventories of enough vintage watch dealers, and you’ll eventually encounter a complication that gets short shrift in the contemporary watch world: the complete (or triple) calendar.

Equipped with day, month, date, and (generally) moonphase readouts, the complete calendar offers all the most useful calendar information in a single, tidy display. The catch? Unlike the annual calendar (which only needs adjusting once per year) and the perpetual calendar (which almost never needs manual adjusting but is incredibly expensive to produce), the complete calendar is relatively affordable due to its movement architecture. At the end of each month, the wearer has to manually advance the displays to sync up with the number of days in said month—a small price to pay for having so much information available at a single glance.

Even so, the complete calendar has been largely eclipsed in the modern era by its more sophisticated cousins; virtually every watch manufacturer used to offer its own version, but that time has long since passed. That said, a handful of firms still make this poetic complication, and though it’s not nearly as commonplace and affordable as it once was, it’s still a worthy entry point into high-end watchmaking. One of the best examples is Jaeger-LeCoultre’s recent refresh of its Master Control Calendar ($15,300): With its ’50s-era good looks and subtle details, it updates the complete calendar for the 2020s, complete with an in-house movement boasting 70 hours of power reserve. What makes the 2025 edition most special, however, is the dial.