Watch Paparazzi

Basketball player Marco Belinelli spotted wearing Gerald Charles

Marco Belinelli, the Italian shooting guard currently suiting up for Virtus Bologna after a storied NBA career, was recently spotted on the wrist wearing one of Gerald Charles's most architecturally daring creations: the platinum Maestro Anniversary, reference GC39-PL — a discontinued model that has grown quietly scarce since leaving the active catalogue.

Gerald Charles was founded in Geneva in 2000 by Gerald Genta's son Charles Genta, carrying forward a design philosophy rooted in the elder Genta's legendary eye for geometric boldness. The Maestro Anniversary's centrepiece is its sliding-hour display — a retrograde jumping hour that advances in linear steps across an aperture cut through the dial, a mechanism that owes its conceptual DNA to the mystery clocks of the nineteenth century. Housed in a 39mm platinum case, the GC39-PL pairs that unusual time-reading format with a hand-wound movement finished to Geneva standards, with bevelled bridges and a rotor-free architecture that keeps the profile remarkably slim for a complication of this nature.

From a collector's standpoint, the GC39-PL occupies an interesting niche: it is technically independent, visually uncompromising, and produced in numbers small enough that intact examples in platinum are genuinely hard to locate. Platinum references of the Maestro Anniversary were never volume pieces, and the discontinuation of the reference has tightened supply further. Collectors who track neo-Geneva independents — the segment populated by names like De Bethune, MB&F, and Urwerk — have long regarded Gerald Charles as underappreciated relative to its movement quality and design ambition.

Belinelli has worn interesting watches throughout his career, but the GC39-PL represents a step into genuine connoisseurship. A former NBA champion with a European sensibility shaped by years playing in Italy, Spain, and France before his stateside run, Belinelli has natural exposure to the Geneva independent scene that many American-based players simply don't encounter.

The UK list price of £29,500 placed the GC39-PL firmly in serious-collector territory during its production run. On the grey market, discontinued platinum examples from Gerald Charles's Maestro line now trade at a premium over that original retail figure, reflecting both the scarcity of the reference and growing recognition of the brand's place in the independent watchmaking landscape.