My First Watch: Jean-Christophe Babin

After 13 years, Jean-Christophe Babin stepped down as chief executive of Bulgari this morning, ceding the Roman house to his deputy, Laura Burdese. He is not leaving the group: he'll remain as chairman of the Bulgari board, overseeing its hotels, and presiding over its foundation. His title becomes the one he assumed last spring, head of LVMH's watch division and its three houses, TAG Heuer, Hublot, and Zenith.

For an executive who has spent his career in the business of time, watches themselves are now at the heart of the job.

Picture this: Paris Orly airport, 1975. Babin, 16, was leaving for Greece alone, a backpack on his shoulder and, his mother noticed, nothing on his wrist. Orly was then a glass-and-steel showpiece of postwar France, opened in 1961 as one of the most modern airports in Europe and, in the mid-1960s, the most visited site in the country, ahead of the Eiffel Tower. Charles de Gaulle airport had opened only the year before, and Orly was still the front door to Paris. She walked him to the tobacco counter and bought the least expensive thing that showed a date, a Kelton, which was really a French Timex of the sort sold beside the lighters and lottery tickets. She chose it for the date rather than the time. "She was afraid I would forget the date and never come back," Babin told Crown & Caliber at Watches & Wonders earlier this year. The watch, a flimsy leash on an elastic band built to stretch as his wrist grew, did its job; he came home, and he still has it.

Babin admitted that he does not enjoy shopping. The watches that have meant the most to him have found him rather than the reverse, he noted, moments after walking through a presentation of the new Octo Finissimo 37, the watch Bulgari unveiled that week. It was far from the only timepiece on the table. Bulgari had also unveiled the platinum Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon, the thinnest flying tourbillon ever made, a studded gold-and-steel Serpenti Tubogas, and a gem-paved Serpenti Aeterna, in a year the maison built around its Gold and Steel signature.

A consequential watch surfaced on a rainy Saturday in Düsseldorf in 1999, a year into a posting at the consumer-goods company Henkel. "I found a watch which I don't know," he said, adding, "it ticked to my heart, and believe it or not, it was a Carrera." It measured 37 mm and cost 800 Deutsche Marks (approximately $465), and he bought it, by his own admission, because his wife told him to.

He liked its plainness as well as the fact that it came from the company that had long kept time for Formula One, a sport he followed with something close to devotion. "And this was my first true luxury watch," he said. Amazingly enough, "nine months later, I was called by LVMH to take the lead of TAG Heuer."

Jack Heuer had named the Carrera in 1963, after a Mexican road race so dangerous it was abandoned within five years, precisely because the word resisted a single meaning. In Spanish it denotes a race and, just as commonly, a career.

The one watch he chose entirely on his own had come earlier still. At 20, newly graduated and three months into a trip around the world before his military service, Babin stopped in Singapore and spent "perhaps a hundred dollars" on the first serious watch he had ever picked for himself. "I bought myself an ultrathin Seiko watch, pretty classical, but really ultra thin quartz this time, because I found it very elegant," he said. "I was so proud to have that watch. So proud."

The man who now runs LVMH's watches kept a few and returned the rest, having worn them all and, at the houses he came to run, had a hand in shaping some himself. The earliest live in a safe, photographed from every angle for insurance, the inexpensive little Kelton among them, still running, its single assignment long since discharged.