Raúl Pagès wins the inaugural Louis Vuitton Prize for Independent Creatives with his RP1 Régulateur à Détente: Here’s Why

Congratulations to Raúl Pagès on winning the 2024 Louis Vuitton Independent Creative Prize with his RP1 Régulateur à Détente. The prize comes with a significant grant of 150,000 euros and a 12-month mentorship at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton.

Raul Pages

Raúl Pagès is an independent Swiss watchmaker (movement designer and restorer). In 2005 he obtained his diploma as a watchmaker-restorer in the manufacture of antique watches with distinction, then in 2006 his diploma as a designer of watch complications at the CIFOM in Le Locle. Pagès is an accomplished musician and a lover of art history and 20th century art^ThCentury of design history.

In 2012, he started his own company to make the 352 components of his Tortue machine entirely by hand. Building on this experience, he designed and manufactured his first timepiece, Soberly Onyx, in a limited edition of 10 pieces in 2016.

In 2022, Pagès launched its RP1 Régulateur à Détente, one of the very rare wristwatches with a detent escapement.

In 2017 he became a member of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants (AHCI).

Raul Pagès RP1 expansion regulator: innovation in tradition

The evolutionary tree is full of branches where life diverged and took different paths to fill different ecological niches. This is an easy way to understand that phylogenetic lineage the common ancestors and common traits that evolved before species diverged. One can trace the evolution of unique traits found only in limited groups of animals and traits found in almost all living things.
Tracing also helps us understand how some creatures branched out early on and no longer had a close relative, so they stayed almost exactly the same for millions or billions of years (or all relatives died out).

Since life began nearly 3.5 billion years ago, much of life has consisted of single-celled organisms. Multicellular life only developed a billion years ago, and since then the diversity of living things has grown explosively.

But the tree of life has a number of evolutionary loners, species that are the only member of their branch, a good example being Homo sapiens, also known as humans. The genus homo appeared just over two million years ago when it separated from other members of the taxonomic family Hominidae (which today includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans).

There were a variety of homo Species such as Homo erectus, Homo habilis and Homo neanderthalensis.

Eventually all other species died out and Homo sapiens was the only one left on our lonely branch of evolution. If it weren’t for the success of Homo sapiens, one might wonder whether branching into a single species is a sign of an evolutionary dead end, but that’s clearly not the case.

Trigger regulator by Raul Pagès

The same applies to watchmaking inventions that have no close relatives, such as the chronometer escapement. It stands alone, so to speak, on its own mechanical branch of evolution and is in danger of extinction, but it is still alive and well, thanks in part to independent watchmaker Raúl Pagès, who has just released his new model RP1 expansion controller.

The Regulator à Détente RP1 is a clean and minimalist design and presents Pagès’ interpretation Detent inhibition and shows that evolution is still possible.

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