A. Lange & Söhne Commemorates 30 Years of Lange 1 with Four New Limited Editions

Time flies when you’re making horological history. For those of us who chronicle the ongoing saga of the luxury watch market, it is difficult to believe that it has been 30 years (to the day, actually, if you’re reading this on October 24, 2024) since the reconstituted A. Lange & Söhne brand unveiled its signature timepiece, the simply named and undeniably iconic Lange 1. Today, with the Lange 1 now representing a wide-ranging family of products within its portfolio, the haute horlogerie house from Saxony, Germany’s ancestral hub of watchmaking, has introduced four new Lange 1 models — all of them limited editions — in celebration of the three-decade milestone.

Two of the new models are variations on the original, classic Lange 1 in the 38.5mm case size that has been its standard since the first model dropped in 1994. The other two watches join the “Little Lange” subfamily that the brand established in 1998, carrying the same movement but in a more understated 36.8mm case size. One model in each size offers the combination of a 950 platinum case and a shimmering, jet-black dial made of black onyx — a gemstone rarely used in watchmaking and which appears here for the first time on a Lange 1 watch. The other two models feature the less rare but always attractive marriage of a pink-gold case with a bright blue dial. Notably, the dial here is made of 925 silver, a precious metal that is also found fairly infrequently in timepieces these days. Both Lange 1 editions are limited to 300 pieces, while the Little Lange 1 models are limited to 150 pieces.

Fans of the Lange 1 — with its trend-setting design language, which at first appears unbalanced but upon close perusal reveals an adherence to the principles of the Golden Ratio — will find nothing unfamiliar in these new models. The hour and minute is displayed in a large subdial at 9 o’clock, with applied Roman numeral indexes at the cardinal points and javelin-style hands. The large date (Lange calls it an “outsize” date) appears in an elegantly framed dual window at 1 o’clock, and the watch’s 72-hour power reserve is indicated in analog fashion at 3 o’clock along a scale from “Auf” (full) to “Ab” (empty), another hallmark device for Lange; and the running seconds tick away independently in another subdial at 5 o’clock that overlaps the larger hours-minutes dial.

The dial’s hands and applied details are in gold, with a rhodiumed finish in the platinum-cased models. The cases exhibit the familiar slender bezel and prominent lugs that have long defined the collection, and for those to whom such minutiae are important, it’s worth noting that the platinum cases are just a smidgen thicker than the gold ones: 10mm thick in the 38.5mm Lange 1 as opposed to 9.8mm in the pink-gold version; and 9.98mm vs. 9.5mm in the 36.8mm Little Lange editions. 

As they have since a technical upgrade in 2015, both the Lange 1 and Little Lange contain within their precious-metal cases the in-house-made, manually wound Caliber L121.1, which replaced and superseded its predecessor, Caliber L901.0. The former is the 50th in-house movement created by A. Lange & Sohne in its relatively brief history; the latter was the very first. In full view behind a sapphire exhibition caseback in all four new watches, Caliber L121.1 is slightly larger and also thinner than its predecessor — 30.6mm x 5.7mm, as opposed to 30.4mm and 5.9mm — and features a free-sprung balance that dispenses with the L901.0’s regulator in favor of a series of eccentric weights meant to make precise regulation easier. It also includes a new arrangement for the gear train that requires fewer gears to effectively drive the various hands in the watch’s asymmetrical arrangement.

Perhaps most significantly from a practical standpoint, the large date has been optimized to a quick-change format, switching over precisely at midnight. It uses a dual-barrel architecture to provide its lengthy three-day power reserve, and features the expected plethora of traditional Saxon decorative elements, including hand engraving on the balance cock, Glashütte ribbing on the bridges and plates, which are made from untreated German silver; and blued screws held in place by gold chatons providing points of pleasant aesthetic contrast.

The 30th anniversary editions of the A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 are all delivered on hand-stitched alligator leather straps, glossy black for the onyx-dial watches and blue for the pink-gold models, with classical prong buckles in case-matching metal (either platinum or gold). The pink-gold, blue-dialed edition of the Lange 1 will be priced at 49,800 euros; for all the others, prices will be available on request.