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Blancpain rebuilds the Ladybird as a 19mm sphere

The Lady B marks 70 years of the Ladybird with a lugless spherical case, an in-house automatic and an Australian price of A$17,400 in steel.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 19 September 2026

• Blancpain marks the Ladybird collection's 70th anniversary with the Lady B, a lugless spherical case built around its automatic caliber 615.
• The case measures 19mm across and 2.9 cubic centimetres in volume, with the strap passing straight through it rather than hanging off lugs.
• Announced on 17 September 2026, the steel and 18K red gold versions are priced at A$17,400 and A$26,400 respectively in Australia.

Watch history has a short list of people who changed the industry without ever appearing on a dial, and Betty Fiechter belongs near the top of it. She was Blancpain's chief executive and the first woman to lead a Swiss watchmaking house, and in 1956 the company under her put its name behind a round movement of just 11.85mm so that a mechanical watch could be made small enough to pass as jewellery. Seventy years later Blancpain has gone back to that idea, not to reissue it but to rebuild it, and the result is the Lady B.

A watch measured in cubic centimetres

The specification Blancpain leads with is not a diameter but a volume: 2.9 cubic centimetres. That is an odd number to print and a deliberate one, because this case is not a disc with sides, it is a sphere with a window cut into the top of it. Diameter alone would tell you almost nothing about how it sits in a palm. The brand's own comparison is a polished pebble, which is exactly right for something with no lugs, no visible strap attachment and nowhere for a fingernail to catch.

The case measures 19mm across, which is not even the smallest thing in Blancpain's own Ladybird cabinet, since the white gold Ladybird Tribute sits at 16mm. Diameter is not what this one is competing on. The strap loop passes straight through the case rather than hanging off it. Blancpain has finished each one by hand, working polished, satin and micro-blasted surfaces in sequence on an already assembled watch, masking each area before starting the next. Even the engraving is cut with mechanical cutters rather than left to a laser.

What a movement from 1995 is doing in here

Caliber 615 is not new, and Blancpain is refreshingly direct about that. It arrived in 1995, it measures 15.70mm across and 3.90mm thick, it holds 180 components and 29 rubies, and it beats at 3Hz for a 38-hour power reserve. What is new is that the entire watch was designed around it rather than the other way round: the case back geometry was shaped to suit the path the rotor actually travels, which is the sort of decision you only make when the movement is the fixed point and everything else negotiates.

Thirty-eight hours is short, and there is no dressing it up. Take this off on a Friday evening and it will have stopped by Sunday lunch. The mitigation, such as it is, is that a watch this small tends to be worn as an accessory rather than a daily driver, and you were going to reset it anyway.

The part that will divide people

A sapphire crystal covers a plain opaline dial and a polished rehaut, and the case back is solid, which is to say you never see the caliber doing its work. I went back and forth on this one. My instinct with a movement decorated in Côtes de Genève and fitted with a silicon balance spring is that you show it, and Blancpain clearly can at this scale, because the 16mm Ladybird Tribute carries a sapphire back. Then I looked at the case again. Cutting a window into the underside of a sphere would have meant either flattening the base or thickening the whole object, and the whole object is the point. Blancpain has chosen the sculpture over the spectacle, and having argued myself out of my first reaction, I think that is the right call.

Water resistance is 3 bar, so rain and a basin are fine and a swimming pool is not. Nobody was going to take this diving.

Seven straps and a case you can have in two metals

Each Lady B ships on a double-tour calf leather strap in one of seven colours: white, beige, mocha, burgundy, blue, coral or purple. Double-tour is the correct answer for a 19mm case, because a single pass of leather under something this small looks like a watch that has shrunk, while two turns around the wrist makes it read as a bracelet with a watch attached. The strap is interchangeable and the width between the horns is 10mm.

The case comes in stainless steel, reference 0064 1142 B24, or 18K red gold, reference 0064 3642 E17. The gold version on a mocha strap is the one Blancpain has led its imagery with, and the steel on blue is the quieter and, to my eye, better-judged of the two.

Blancpain Lady B pricing and availability

Blancpain announced both references on 17 September 2026 and sells them through its own boutiques and points of sale. The steel Lady B is A$17,400 in Australia, or US$12,600, and the 18K red gold version is A$26,400, or US$19,200.

Those are jewellery prices rather than watch prices, and they will strike some readers as a lot for a two-handed watch with a 38-hour reserve. That objection is fair on a spec sheet and it misses what is being sold. The 1956 Ladybird made its name because Blancpain solved smallness without giving up robustness, adding a fifth wheel to the train to control the force reaching the escapement and fitting shock protection that most tiny movements of the era simply went without. This is the same argument made again in a case shaped like a bubble. Whether that is worth the money depends entirely on whether you think miniaturisation is a complication. Blancpain plainly does, and having spent a morning turning the brand's own images over, so do I.