M.A.D.3 Vincent Calabrese: Does the Baladin Belong in a M.A.D.Editions World?

What makes his story compelling, though, is not the résumé. It is the way he tells it: with an almost unsettling lack of bitterness about the projects that made fortunes for others while leaving him behind, the companies that went under, the patents he sold too early. At one particularly difficult point in his career, he rebuilt from scratch by developing four entirely new movements in the space of a few months, simply because creating was never really optional for him. He is 82 years old and as restless as ever. That kind of person is exactly the right collaborator for a project like this.

The Complication That Feels Human

The heart of the M.A.D.3 is the Baladin complication. Its principle is deceptively simple: he disliked the abruptness of a traditional jumping hour, the way it snaps from one numeral to the next with no acknowledgement of the time that passed between them. So he made the hours wander – slowly, progressively travelling across the dial while the minutes continue their own movement independently.

The first time you look at it, it is almost confusing. The second time, it clicks into place and it changes your relationship with the display in a way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. It feels less like a machine telling you something and more like time actually happening in front of you.

Two Weeks on the Wrist (in Pink)

I had the M.A.D.3 in the pink edition – reserved for The Tribe and Friends, alongside a blue version offered through the raffle – for a couple of weeks, and I should address the colour immediately. “Pink” undersells it: this is a deep, warm raspberry, rich and slightly unpredictable in different lights. It can read as almost red under tungsten, genuinely rosy in daylight, and something closer to coral at dusk. Wherever it lands, it carries the kind of tension the press release describes well: elegant yet expressive, refined yet slightly dangerous.

At 40mm with a 43.7mm lug-to-lug, the watch sits exactly where it should. The case, designed by Eric Giroud, carries floating lugs – a detail that immediately signals its M.A.D.Editions DNA – combined with a layered architecture and domed sapphire crystals both front and back. The 12.7mm height might look alarming on paper, but the case geometry distributes it well.

The dial itself rewards attention. The bombé minute ring is crafted in sapphire, creating a subtle sense of depth. Super-LumiNova is integrated beneath transparent elements rather than simply applied on top, which gives the luminous reading a different quality. The layered construction of the discs adds to this sense that there is always something slightly more happening than you initially registered.

A Hidden Sentence and Other Pleasures

Through the openings of the spinning rotor, a sentence progressively reveals itself as the movement rotates: “Il est assez aisé de plaire aux autres, bien plus ardu d’être fier de soi” – it is fairly easy to please others, far more difficult to be proud of oneself. It is a phrase chosen as a quiet portrait of Calabrese. It takes a moment to catch all of it, which is probably the point. The kind of detail that goes entirely unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t know to look, and that means a great deal to anyone who does.

Pricing and Verdict

The M.A.D.3 is positioned at a price point – CHF 2,900 – that puts it squarely in the territory where the M.A.D.Editions proposition becomes genuinely interesting to a wider audience. 

What M.A.D.Editions has managed here is rarer than it looks: a genuine collaboration between two creative sensibilities. The Baladin complication belongs entirely to Vincent Calabrese. The execution, the colors, the case architecture, the hidden sentence – these belong to the M.A.D.Editions universe as it has developed over five years. These two elements sit together with a naturalness that takes real effort to achieve.

As Calabrese himself says: “Do not stay on the highway. Take your own path.”

For more information, please visit the M.A.D.Editions website.