“You’ve got classic car in my timepiece!” “You’ve got timepiece in my classic car!” The watch startup Atelier Jalaper didn’t exist in the 1970s, but if it had, the ads would write themselves. The company’s founders, Louis Jalaber and Simon Szleper, have taken an interesting approach to creating a luxury watch — which is to say, they’ve incorporated part of an iconic automobile into its very design.
As a recent Autoblog article points out, Atelier Jalaper’s watches incorporate part of the hood (or bonnet, if you’re in an Anglophile mood today) of an Aston Martin DB5.
The project began in 2019, with the manufacturing component taking close to a year to reach fruition. The company faced an additional challenge immediately out of the gate — namely, finding and verifying a DB5 hood that could be used in the process of making the watches. Eventually, they were able to find one near London, and had it verified by the Aston Martin Heritage Trust.
The hood was flattened, at which point hundreds of dials were cut out of the material and used for the watches. Currently, the company makes two varieties of the timepieces: the AJ001, which tracks the date, and the AJ002, which tracks the day and date. (Both utilize Miyota movements.) The former starts at €800; the latter at €1,080.
It might not be a watch worn by James Bond, but it is one made from his car — or, at least, a car very similar to it.
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