Given the location and the wealth concentrated in the city, it’s no surprise that the exhibitor list is full of what you might call alt-Pateks, the brands to catch your eye before or after your number comes up for that coveted Nautilus or World Time Calatrava. Of note this year is the concentration of technically ambitious (and correspondingly pricy) makers such as Ferdinand Berthoud, Greubel Forsey, HYT and de Bethune, as well as more craft-focused makers such as Chopard, H Moser, Parmigiani and Laurent Ferrier.

Meanwhile, there’ll always be strong interest in the independent sector, however loosely defined, and Dubai Watch Week is a chance for those brands to get in front of the watch-buying public on more equal terms. What is notable is that the value range extends right through to the likes of Ming, Oris and Studio Underdog.

Dubai Watch Week 2025 highlights

Van Cleef & Arpels

The Brassée de Lavande is a new table-top automaton featuring a central lavender bouquet that opens to reveal a butterfly with orange plique-à-jour enamel wings, diamond accents, and black enamel contours. The butterfly’s body is crafted from tiger’s eye with amethyst cabochon eyes and diamond-tipped antennae. Detailed lacquered buds and an integrated carillon mechanism complete the piece

Chopard

The new L.U.C Grand Strike from Chopard is as technically ambitious as it comes: a highly complex chiming watch with a minute repeater and both grande and petite sonnerie functions, all using sapphire crystal gongs. Developed over 11,000 hours and protected by ten proprietary patents (five created specifically for this watch), it is the most intricate timepiece Chopard has ever produced – the culmination of a decades long adventure in sonnerie watches.

Parmigiani

Parmigiani are showing an ‘Arctic Rose’ edition of its PF Tonda Rattrapante, a sort of slow-food chronograph that unfussily allows you set a time interval with its extra minute hand. But it’s less about what it does and all about how beautifully it’s done–the subtlety of the finishes, (particularly theGrain d’Orge guilloché treatment on the dial) and the perfectly fluid shape of the case and bracelet take care of that.

Louis Vuitton

The Escale gets a gorgeously 70s makeover with two new stone dial editions that are being unveiled at Dubai. The new 40mm watches have dials and case rings in turquoise and malachite respectively, and are matched with platinum versions of the trunk inspired case that Louis Vuitton refreshed in 2024. Matthieu Hegi, Louis Vuitton’s Watch ArtisticDirector, promised at the 2024 launch, that a multitude of colours and materials would star in the new Escale and these two watches are that promise delivered.

Pérpetuel Gallery

Away from the Dubai Mall, the Pérpetuel Gallery will be hosting a stellar cast of top level makers including Roger Smith, Fiona Kruger and star of the future, Renaud Tixier. The Monday Watch, first seen last year, gets new dials to compliment the exceptional marriage of innovation and craftsmanship that Dominique Renaud and Julien Tixier have brought to the project.

In a similar vein, the Chronometry prize – celebrating excellence in timekeeping – was awarded to a recreation of Zenith’s Calibre 135, the most awarded movement in the history of chronometers. Represented this year as the ‘GFJ’ to mark the 160th anniversary of the company’s founding by Georges Favre-Jacot, the winning watch features a 39mm case with a striking lapis lazuli dial surrounded by a ‘brick’ guilloché motif inspired by the façade of the manufacture in Le Locle.

Among the other winners were Anton Suhanov, who took the Revelation prize for his tabletop world timer tourbillon clock; Audemars Piguet, recognised for the latest iteration of its Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar, fitted with the new, fully crown-set Cailbre 7138; and Bulgari, which won a further prize for its groundbreaking series of Finissimo models, this time in the Tourbillon category.

Other prizes were distributed between Chopard (which took two, for Ladies Compilation and Sports), and Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta, both dial names recently revived under the auspices of the Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, honoured in the Time-Only and Ladies’ categories respectively.

The Special Jury Prize honoured Alain Dominique Perrin, president of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, for his visionary role in promoting high-quality watchmaking.

All 90 of the nominated timepieces, including the 19 winners, are on display at the Geneva Musée d'Art et d'Histoire until 16 November 2025.

The 2025 GPHG winners

‘Aiguille d’Or’ Grand Prix : Breguet, Classique Souscription 2025

Chronometry Prize: Zenith, G.F.J. Calibre 135

Horological Revelation Prize: Anton Suhanov, St Petersburg Easter Egg Tourbillon Clock

Audacity Prize: Fam Al Hut, Möbius

Iconic Watch Prize: Audemars Piguet, Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar

Mechanical Exception Watch Prize: Greubel Forsey, Nano Foudroyante

Chronograph Watch Prize: Angelus, Chronographe Télémètre Yellow Gold

Tourbillon Watch Prize: Bulgari, Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon

Sports Watch Prize: Chopard, Alpine Eagle 41 SL Cadence 8HF

Men’s Complication Watch Prize: Bovet 1822, Récital 30

Men’s Watch Prize: Urban Jürgensen, UJ-2: Double wheel natural escapement

Time Only Watch Prize: Daniel Roth, Extra Plat Rose Gold

Jewellery Watch Prize: Dior Montres, La D de Dior Buisson Couture

Artistic Crafts Watch Prize: Voutilainen, 28GML SOUYOU

Ladies’ Complication Watch Prize: Chopard, Imperiale Four Seasons

Ladies’ Watch Prize: Gérald Genta, Gentissima Oursin Fire Opal

‘Petite Aiguille’ Watch Prize: MAD Editions, MAD2 Green

Challenge Watch Prize: Dennison, Natural Stone Tiger Eye In Gold

Mechanical Clock Prize: L’Épée 1839, Albatross L’Épée 1839 X MB&F

Special Jury Prize: Alain Dominique Perrin

If that sounds somewhat pedestrian, it’s the fact watch movements require lubricants – necessary to stop certain of their moving parts abrading through contact with other parts – and that, over time and temperature shifts, even the most advanced synthetic lubricants eventually degrade, attract dirt or dry out, which means mechanical movements must be periodically serviced to correct, maintain reliability and accuracy. That’s the often considerable hidden cost of mechanical watch ownership.

Friction also increases the amount of energy required for a watch movement to operate at its maximum efficiency. Although now typically applied by robots, the very requirement for a movement to have oil - of differing kinds and precise quantities at differing points - adds to the complexity and cost of manufacture too.

The esteemed British watchmaker Roger Smith has been working with the university over the last couple of years to develop a 2D molybdenum disulphide-based nano material that can be used to coat certain watch parts to bring about a measurable reduction in friction. The team isn’t giving too many details, as patent applications are in play, but it has a proof of concept - a watch built by Smith - and believes its process will represent a marked step forward, especially when combined with the '99 per cent friction-free' co-axial escapement - designed by Smith’s tutor George Daniels and since improved on by Smith. He reckons his latest model - the recently-launched Series 6 - will go 15 years between servicing, against the industry standard of around five years, with watches that will do 25 years realistically achievable.

This isn’t to say there are not challenges. 'Understanding this nano material, being able to consistently replicate it and being able to say it will reduce friction and do so consistently too is still very hard,' concedes Dr. Samuel Rowley-Neale, who heads the Manchester Metropolitan University advanced materials department. 'But if we can crack its use in watches - at such a small scale - then we can also see it following the F1 model and trickling down to other industries the likes of aerospace and automotive.' He estimates they are just three years until they have an industrial-scale methodology.

Others have tried similar things before, of course: the last 20 years have seen the introduction of many friction-busting technologies, typically embodied in one-off, or limited production experimental watches, notably Cartier’s ID One, Jaeger LeCoultre’s Master Compressor Extreme LAB and Panerai’s LAB-ID. Ulysee Nardin, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Rolex and Sinn have also made various advances, among them escapements in silicon, ceramic ball-bearings and axels and various uses of diamond-like coatings or DLCs, as well as experiments using lighter alloys, galvanising and magnetic pivots.

But these bring step changes in the efficiency of parts - at some considerable increase in the cost of the watches they’re used in - rather than across the whole. Any claims made to have created a ‘lubricant-free watch’ are, as yet, exaggerated. And some watchmakers are of the belief that, friction being a matter of physics and the blight of all forms of engine, the best that can be hoped for is the greatest reduction in the use of oil, with complete elimination unlikely.

Besides, it wouldn’t just take a technological breakthrough to bring about the truly lubricant-free watch but, according to Smith, also a change in mindset across the watch industry. 'I don’t think there’s really any great interest [across the watch industry] in making these kinds of improvements,' he says (admittedly with some cynicism). 'I think the feeling is that it’s a huge business and we know watches work with current technology - so why bother trying to re-think the foundations?'

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In the 1980s, Simpson constructed a makeshift studio on Wednesdays at the Roxy – a roller disco/nightclub hybrid in Chelsea, NYC – and set up backdrops and lighting in order to photograph the amazing ensembles sported by clubgoers. As Ethiopian-American artist Awol Erizku writes in ‘The Aesthetics of Defiance’ (his essay about her 'landmark body of work: one that celebrates the hip-hop aesthetic and preserves its essence for posterity'): 'Style is never just style: it’s history, it’s rebellion, and it’s self-definition.' The subjects were impertinent peacocks: 'They weren’t passengers blending into the flow of the city, they were curating a spectacle.'

Nonetheless, Simpson was inspired by the classicism of Richard Avedon’s black-and-white portraits from the series In the American West, in which coal miners, waitresses, and oil field workers were made to look iconic instead of ordinary. Simpson, too, wished to elevate Black citizens, as people worth scrutinising.

Meanwhile, on the sidewalks of New York, Simpson was also selling jewellery she’d made. The homespun endeavour reached a turning point when designer Carolina Herrera spotted her work and invited her to bring her collection to her studio. Thereafter, Simpson’s jewellery gained a following through word of mouth and influential figures who championed her work. Her cameo habillé, referencing an 1800s staple accessory but based on a more modern Chanel template, had no parallel when she decided to make one starring a Black woman in profile. In 1993, she licensed the acrylic and slate cameo to Avon (Elizabeth Taylor was working with the brand at the time, too). The piece was first stocked at Studio Museum in Harlem; it has been worn by a wide clientele of everyday Black women, but also by Rosa Parks and Rihanna.

The jewellery work supported Simpson’s photography work. Doing both concurrently was a pragmatic choice, but also reflects her very contemporary attitude that being a creative person means patching together different practices, rather than being beholden to one niche thing: multiple endeavours can nourish each other.

Her jewellery design process is always inspired by the materials available. 'I like it all: plastics, real metals, it just has to speak to me at the moment. I don't question what I like. I just buy it. And I may not use it for ten years but, eventually, it will be used,' she says.

She always designs with herself in mind, so much so that at first, when she started making jewellery, she didn't want to sell any of the pieces. 'I would keep them just for me. And then I said, you're not going to make any money doing this. You gotta sell it! And then I realised I could always make fabulous pieces. And those are the pieces that people want to buy.'

She gravitates towards extravagance: 'For my more glamorous customers, I just let myself go, because that's me. You want to own the room.' But simpler items sell more readily. At first, she had more white women as customers, from the fashion world. Then, when she came out with the cameo, a Black following blossomed.

Sometimes, clients will bring her broken pieces, and she'll take them apart and rework them to make something new. She likes going to a thrift shop, cutting up and repurposing something. 'I don't throw anything away. I just keep it and reuse it, because it's still valuable – but you have to rework it.'

It's a similar thinking that applies to her collages: she would reconceive test prints. 'I printed on paper that's expensive when I was in the dark room, so why throw it away? Make a new piece.' When she would get a photograph back from the printer, and the colour wasn't as intense as she wanted it to be, she would hand-paint it with nail polish to make it the way she envisioned it, a kind of do-it-yourself Photoshop before Photoshop. It’s an approach she cites from the famous Black photographer James Van Der Zee, who said, to paraphrase, that the trick is getting the camera to see it the way you see it.

Simpson’s first eponymous book is portrait-focused, though her archives are full of documentary and street photography too. The book, published by Aperture, is part of its Vision & Justice series. It makes sense as a categorisation despite not being explicitly about socio-politics: it is instead about a subtle gaze.

Simpson’s candid representation was inherently politically charged by privileging Black life, community, and style as beautiful, important, and worthy of careful consideration. 'It's when you look at it afterwards you think about these things,' Simpson notes of using this political framework through which to read her work. 'My whole feeling about taking these photographs over the years was just to give dignity to my subjects, who I felt didn't have the dignity that they should have.' She only came to photography in her mid- to late-thirties, and ultimately, her approach was: 'When you take a photograph, you're saying to the public, look at this. Look at how fabulous this is! And look at my fabulous life!'

Simpson embodies fabulousness. On our Zoom call, she was wearing a blue head-wrap, glasses, a gold necklace with her signature Black cameo, and a black dress with a colourful feather print. Fresh from a vacation in Puerto Rico ('Your problems could be solved when you're in the water, laying in the sunshine,' she advises), she had fittingly set a beach background with blue seas and palm trees as an overlay to her Brooklyn apartment.

Are stylish people easier to photograph because they are more aware of being perceived? 'In a way, because it's empowerment: someone took the time to get up, put themselves together, and that's no easy feat sometimes... anyone that took the time to do a self-presentation really likes the attention.' Even in the street today, she still pulls people aside. 'If I see something amazing – you have to be truly amazing to me to stop you – it's fun.' She recalls recently photographing a Black woman in head-to-toe bubblegum pink – her boyfriend was also wearing pink – 'and it makes your day when you see somebody like that! Because it shows the joie de vivre that you got up and did this, and presented yourself to the public like this.'

Simpson is 83 now, 'but I still want to work, so I still always carry my camera. It keeps you going and excited.' Simpson has always been a formidable doer. The performance artist Lorraine O’Grady once asked her how she could make money. Simpson’s advice was: 'If I were you, that picture with you all dressed up in the armour? Make a pin out of it, put it on a button or something, and sell it when you have signings of your books.' Simpson follows the Andy Warhol ethos of branding: people want a piece of you. 'They may not be able to afford a $25,000 photograph, but they can buy a cameo for $40.'

When Simpson went to an opening recently, she followed her own advice and brought some tiny pins, pinning them on different people and taking photographs of them to use for a National Gallery catalogue. 'I said, Coreen, you're brilliant. Because I [thought], I'm going out, wait a minute… there's going to be some beautiful people there. Let me put the pin on them and photograph them! And that's what I did!’ They kept the pins, and Simpson has fabulous photos to show for it.

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is published by Aperture, 2025, available at amazon.co.uk

It marked the beginning of a distinctive jewellery style which encompassed everything from punk to pastels. In Westwood’s hands, jewellery was daring, fun, fearless and feisty, becoming something entirely her own.

Westwood’s love of the medium is the subject of a new book, Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery, published by Thames & Hudson. 'Safety-pins piercing faces. Pearl chokers and droplet earrings borrowed from Elizabethan portraits. Bondage chains and sado-masochistic buckled cuffs and dog-collars. Crowns and medallions and bejewelled regal orbs. The jewellery vocabulary of Vivienne Westwood is as distinct and immediately recognisable as that of her clothing,’ says author, fashion critic Alexander Fury.

Ten chapters pay homage to the jewellery which defined Westwood’s style, from pearls to bows, a DIY philosophy to memento mori. Throughout, we notice omnipresent themes. Sex is a frequent reference, particularly when translated into the embellished cuffs and padlocks synonymous with BDSM. Activism, too, is key, with political slogans and recycled materials an enduring favourite for Westwood, while punk, safety pins and badges will always remain a hallmark of Westwood’s style.

‘Jewellery is powerful, and it can be loaded with meaning,’ adds Andreas Kronthaler, creative director, Vivienne Westwood. ‘It marks life, and it gives importance to it. The Orb logo itself is a jewel, symbolising the world with its past, its present and through adding the Saturn ring, its future. It’s very British and very Vivienne.’

'Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery' is published by Thames & Hudson

These are defined by ultra modern design elements, from the juxtapositions of mixed-cut diamonds in ‘Inner Fire’ to the sharp silhouettes of ‘Rock Diamonds’ and elegant angles of ‘Skyline’. A careful consideration of cut, clarity and form brings a frisson to traditional silhouettes, seen in the chic ‘Baguette Love’ hoop earrings.

First created in the 1920s, the baguette cut is enduringly synonymous with the art deco aesthetic, a bygone glamour that Bucherer reinterprets here. The historical meets the haute in thickly drawn loops of 18ct yellow gold, studded with 26 baguette-cut diamonds, for earrings that feel as modern now as they would have done a century ago

bucherer.com

For Louis Vuitton, silhouettes are oversized, while Cartier's delicately sized earrings champion the pared-back. Van Cleef & Arpels and Tiffany & Co demonstrate their mastery of embellishment, while Piaget's delicate watch swinging from a necklace of precious stones rewrites jewellery rules entirely. Taken together, these pieces make for high jewellery that is exciting, bold and very modern.

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘I felt it was important to include a variety of scale - including global brands, mid-sized and niche single artists,’ Grants adds on the artists, institutions, collectors and style icons who made the cut. ‘Also all cultures, art movements and eras, from the historical to the contemporary and also costume, fine, high and art jewellery. Within that, we pulled out seminal examples of creativity that flowed together in harmony when looking at the last 200 years of jewellery.’

Jewellery in the book is both established – from heritage houses including Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier and Tiffany & Co – and contemporary; Joe Sheehan’s argillite chains and John Moore’s necklaces made from Morphit (clay mixed with recycled paper) are more modern additions. Artists who have dipped their toe into the jewellery world, including Louise Bourgeois and Salvador Dalí, are also included here. What unites them? ‘Greatness,’ says Grant.

‘I hope jewellery experts discover new and unexpected people, ideas and moments in jewellery,’ she adds ‘For novices, students or hobbyists, I hope they will start their journey with us, by understanding the journeys of some of the most prolific instigators of jewellery over the past two centuries. For makers, collectors, designers, brand teams and the trade, I hope they see this as an important overview of a market constantly in flux. It's tough out there at the moment but it's important to remember that the entire course of jewellery is cyclical. Its depth of meaning owes much to its longevity and desirability as material culture.’

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A what? That’s a watch – like the new Bulova Racing Chronograph, taking its stylistic inspiration from the 1967 Shelby GT500 – with the chronograph pushers clustered not around the 3 o’clock position, as is commonplace, but around the 12 o’clock position, like a traditional mechanical stopwatch. (The name comes from the watch’s heart-shaped case and pushers mimicking a bull’s head and horns). Nonetheless the decision, concedes Bulova’s senior watch designer, Donell Hutson, is a gamble.

'We thought a bullhead made sense, because the design came out of motorsports – when drivers wanted something easier to use to time their laps, and placing the pushers on top made for a more accessible arrangement. That position also helps to avoid accidental activation,' he explains. 'But the [configuration] is bulkier than a lot of chronographs available and the look is considered a little out there. You don’t see many bullheads because the design isn’t considered to be commercial.'

But while bullheads have been few and far between – Omega released the first bullhead watch in 1969 and re-issued a modern version in 2013, now something of a collector’s piece, with Seiko, Breitling and Tissot following up with models in the early 1970s – Bulova is not the only brand to revisit the bullhead of late. Citizen – which would also become an established name for bullhead designs over the 1970s – in 2023 reissued its Tsuno Chrono Racer bullhead and followed up last year with a special edition in collaboration with the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. Various smaller brands – from Stuhrling to CT Scuderia and Sinn – have also dabbled over recent years.

Interest in bullheads is rising precisely because there are so few of them around and people are looking for models that stand out,' reckons Citizen’s director of merchandising Neall Brick, who adds that the styles revival may have been sparked by Brad Pitt wearing a Citizen 8110 Challenger Time Bullhead in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (even if the film is set three years before the model was released). 'The distinctive shape of the bullhead has to be individually tooled so they don’t offer economies of scale [for the manufacturer]. So the bullhead is still unlikely to become a major trend. It really stands out on the wrist but is set to remain a watch for the niche crowd.'

Handmade in the east London studio they share, their work combines contorted forms with simple functionality, crafting fine jewellery that is gestural and unapologetic. 'We don't use a lot of decorative adornment because it can often be a distraction to hide behind,' says Chaplin. 'What we’re enthusiastic about is being honest and clear about how things are done.'

Raw materials double as both subject matter and medium, taking centre-stage in a celebration of the unique properties that make them precious metals. 'We think a lot about what we’re asking the silver to do,' says Farnan. 'And how we can highlight and amplify it.' There’s more to what makes a metal valuable than just the expense, and CC-Steding embodies that deeper meaning.

'Working with something like stainless steel is a lovely idea, but too complex,' says Chaplin. 'Gold and silver don’t tarnish or degrade easily. They’re soft and malleable enough that you can work on them by hand but they're hard enough to last a lifetime. Whatever emotion or moment is attached to it, our jewellery should have a purpose, so it needs to last.'

This unfussy and intimate sense of storytelling lends itself to collaboration, whether on showpieces for knitwear designer Cecile Tulkens or custom jewellery for Lorde’s world tour. But commissioned or not, the work always feels personal. That’s why having the opportunity to see and hold it in real life at a store like Two’s Care in London’s Hackney is so special, because you can connect with the weight and feel.

'I like the idea that you can pinpoint the moment when a piece of jewellery came into your life,' says Farnan. 'It reminds me of when we were younger, and it would have been badges from gigs instead of a necklace or earrings, but to me they felt like treasure.'

cc-steding.com

In the heady days of 1980s space exploration, the digital Seiko ‘Astonaut’ proved to be one such genre-defying watch. Despite never being officially issued by NASA, it was worn on over 160 space missions. The unisex design, light and simple to use, was particularly loved by women, worn by those including the first American woman in space in 1983, Sally Ride, and the first American woman to perform a spacewalk, Kathryn Sullivan.

Now, Seiko is revisiting the golden age of digital with the newly released watch, known among fans as the “Rotocall” , a reinterpreted version of the much-loved original. Faithfully created in the same red, yellow and blue colours as the 40-year-old original, the new watch also has the same eight functions - including time, alarms, dual time, stopwatch, counter and timer- which can be easily changed with a turn of the bezel. Like the original, the watch is powered by the quartz movement, first introduced by Seiko in 1969.

The Seiko 'Rotocall' watches, £480 from seikoboutique.co.uk

'The vintage watch market is huge now, but we wanted to find a point of difference [before entering it], in terms of the watches we could offer and ones that also fit into the stories of the new watches we may one launching,' says David Seyffer, IWC’s head of archive. Through selling via its shops, IWC aims to underscore the availability of after-sales support not commonly found in the largely online vintage watch market and to offer the same experience as buying new.

The watches will be sourced through private owners and collectors and authenticated against IWC’s production records. Pricing, Seyffer says, won’t be 'commercial' - that is, akin to that applied to new watches - but will 'be fair to the investment' put into their restoration.

'A lot of people approach us with watches [for sale] and if those pieces are not right for the IWC museum - and what goes in there stays in there - then maybe they can work for Curated,' explains Seyffer. Most of these watches will be sourced in Switzerland - 'there may, for example, be friends or relatives of people who used to work for the company, who were given an IWC watch and then forgot about it' he suggests - and selected according to rarity, condition and an assessment of possible restoration, if required. 'It would have been great to have had a [load of] deadstock watches somewhere at IWC - but unfortunately not,' he laughs.

Seyffer adds that while the watch industry has certainly pursued a vintage aesthetic over recent years - ‘heritage’ designs and ‘re-issues’ being a dominant trend - there’s a customer seeking the 'emotional value' in the genuinely vintage but who also wants restoration to a standard perhaps only feasible by the original manufacturer. IWC is not alone in this: Vacheron Constantin and Rolex also offer sales of their pre-owned watches, with Cartier running a part-exchange service.

'I think the conclusion was that IWC may as well be part of this vintage market but in a dedicated, exclusive way and not a huge scale,' says Seyffer. Curated will offer a rolling stock of tens of pieces, not more. 'This is, in a way, a process of heritage management for IWC,' he says.

'The big watch brands are finally waking up to vintage, less as a money-spinner and more as a means of underscoring their prestige,' argues David Silver, director of London-based pre-owned Rolex specialist The Vintage Watch Company. 'Most have gone through their archives in terms of design and there’s a growing interest in their histories - so addressing the vintage watch market themselves is a way of putting the spotlight on those.'

But, Silver adds, it’s precisely the inability of customers to buy certain new models from some brands - either because production can’t keep pace or because distribution is deliberately limited - that has in part driven more watch fans into the vintage market in the first place.

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'Gleitze’s Channel crossing, nearly a century ago, laid the foundation for what would become a legacy of tool watches built for real-world performance. The Oyster was instrumental in the transition from pocket to wristwatches, and the Mercedes Gleitze watch played an important role in this transition, rendering it one of the most significant wristwatches still in private hands,' says Sam Hines, Sotheby’s Global Chairman of Watches.

This Sotheby’s sale is being closely watched by brands that hope women can help bolster sales, which are currently mired in general luxury fatigue. Women’s watches, particularly versatile models that can be taken from the gym to the boardroom to cocktail receptions, just like the one worn by Gleitze on her heroic swim, are proving a bright spot, and the Sotheby's sale can help keep the momentum.

Think of Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Offshore with a shimmering, textured rubber strap that echoes the Tapisserie motif of the dial, encased in rose gold – light and comfortable for weightlifting, yet with enough glamour to transition to a business meeting.

'The most elegant sea watch,' is how Breitling CEO Georges Kern defines his company’s latest Superocean Heritage, which comes with a sleek rubber mesh strap that looks every bit as refined as its steel counterpart – proof of how much brands have invested in research and development to deliver comfort without sacrificing elegance.

And some steel watches, like Tiffany & Co’s latest Atlas model with a comfortable 29mm case, or Chopard Happy Sport (the name says it all), are so light you forget you’re wearing them and never want to take them off, just as Gleitze refused to wear any watch other than the Rolex Oyster.

And how could Gleitze abandon her faithful watch? After the swim, she declared, 'You will like to hear that the Rolex Oyster watch I carried on my Channel swim proved itself a reliable and accurate timekeeping companion even though it was subjected to complete immersion for ten hours and 24 minutes in seawater at a temperature not more than 14 degrees Celsius and often as low as ten degrees Celsius. This is to say nothing about the sustained buffeting it must have received. Not even the quick change to the high temperature of the boat cabin when I was lifted from the water seemed to affect the even tenor of its movement. The newspaper man was astonished, and I, of course, am delighted with it.'

For auction details, see sothebys.com

Retro technology meets movie trivia in the watch, created in collaboration with Universal Products & Experiences (UP&E). The watch face is inspired by the Time Machine itself, featuring its distinctive taillights and OUTATIME licence plates, with different-coloured buttons referencing the time circuits that set the destination date and time, while an engraved caseback and buckle acknowledge the flux capacitor and logo. Priced at £115, the watch comes in special packaging, resembling a vintage videotape, making this a collector’s edition on the playful – and affordable – side.

‘Back To The Future holds a special place with us here at Casio; being part of the iconic trilogy from the start, in 1985, it is our great privilege to be able to celebrate 40 years since we saw Marty set eyes on the DeLorean for the first time,’ says Warren Halliwell, senior marketing campaign manager at Casio UK. ‘The creation of this watch has been a real passion project. I can’t wait for fans all over the world to discover the many intricate details found in this timepiece and our content.’

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Curated by Nature Morte and envisioned by Sean Anderson, the exhibition gathered twenty-three Indian and international artists to reimagine the nāga (the serpent) as a living cosmology. Anderson’s curatorial intelligence shaped the show as a living archive, a conversation that never concludes. His approach insisted on exchange: art speaking with art, artists with viewers, myth with material. Nothing in Serpenti Infinito was still. Its structure pulsed with dialogue; labour, indigeneity, and transformation intertwined like the serpent’s own body.

Serpenti Infinito revolves around cycles of creation, shedding, and renewal. Across three chapters - Crafting Serpents in History, A Mythic Presence, and Infinite Transformations - the exhibition traces how the serpent’s image and idea have coiled across millennia, carrying with it the wisdom of metamorphosis.

The lineage began in Rome. As Jean-Christophe Babin, Bvlgari’s CEO, reminded the audience, Rome is not simply where Bvlgari was founded, it is the maison’s first muse. 'Its architecture, grandeur, and colour gave us a boldness,' he says. 'Where others made luxury delicate, like the French, Rome made it monumental.' The contrast is telling. French minimalism prized subtlety and singularity: white diamonds, one metal, one line. Roman design, in Bvlgari’s hands, became an act of aesthetic fearlessness; coloured stones, voluptuous form, gold that gleams like sunlight on ruins.

It was Cleopatra, Babin recalled, who once wore a serpent-shaped bracelet upon her arrival in Rome, an object that was both ornament and proclamation, beauty turned into sovereignty. For Bvlgari, that myth endures. 'Like the snake shedding its skin,' Babin says, 'jewellery allows you to become another version of yourself, not someone else, but someone latent within you.'

If Rome birthed Bvlgari’s language of audacity, Asia now extends it. The year began in Shanghai with the 'Serpenti Infinito' exhibition, which paved the way for the current celebration in Tokyo (live until 15^th December), Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures and Crafts at the National Art Center, a collaboration with SANAA and Formafantasma. Japan, with its deep aesthetic traditions of wabi-sabi, shibui, and restraint, offered a very different stage. SANAA’s translucent architecture turned colour into atmosphere, with light diffused through veils of glass and silk, where edges disappeared and hues breathed. Formafantasma’s interventions mapped gemstone tonality onto glass and resin, showing how colour itself could become an act of contemplation. Kaleidos embodied a Japanese ethos: beauty as balance, precision, and continuity. Restrained, embodying stability amid flux.

In Mumbai, that quiet chromatic poise transformed into mythic movement. Here, the serpent became the central metaphor; fluid yet grounded, forever in motion but anchored in essence.

Chapter I: Crafting Serpents in History opens with Bvlgari’s Tubogas watches of the 1940s and the five-coil Pallini bracelet of 1955, displayed alongside Indian manuscripts and ritual objects the Sapta Nadi Tantric Text, the Nag-yash Yantra, and Bhuta Theyyam breastplates. These artifacts, tracing the serpent as symbol of energy, water, and rebirth, revealed a shared belief between Roman artisans and Indian cosmologies, here ornament is a vessel of life force.

Nearby, R. Srinivasan and L. Rathakrishnan’s 108 Karanas of Natyashastra translated that life force into motion. Inspired by Shiva Nataraja, the god who dances the universe into being, the serpent a companion in rhythm. Shiva, the indigenous god of paradox, both masculine and feminine, protector and destroyer, dances with serpents coiled around his neck. His motion sustains the world, his stillness dissolves it. The serpent here is continuation, a symbol of boundless energy and metamorphosis.

Chapter II: A Mythic Presence wove the serpent’s afterlives through contemporary art. Bharti Kher’s Medusa, a resin-cast female figure cloaked in saris, her skin covered with hundreds of snake-shaped bindis, embodied the tension between fear and divinity, feminine and monstrous. Ritika Merchant’s triptych Zoomorph II, with Gaia encircled by a cosmic serpent, summoned a pre-rational knowing, a mythic intelligence that transcends comprehension. Padma Shri Baua Devi’s Bal Basant (2005), painted in the bharni style of Mithila, transformed the serpent into witness: a mediator of fertility, tenderness, and domesticity. Her eco-critical vocabulary framed the snake as kin, its presence a grammar of coexistence, in contrast to non-indigenous recognitions of the naga as a threat, worshipped with reverence laced with fear.

Chapter III: Infinite Transformations turned from myth to technology. Refik Anadol’s Infinito, a 360° mirrored chamber, immersed viewers in data-driven waves of serpentine light. Enter Projects’ Rattan Snake reimagined the serpent as woven architecture, rattan looping like breath, blurring craft and computation. Harshit Agrawal’s VR installation transformed the viewer into serpent, moving through digital terrain that mirrored both desire and decay. These works gestured toward the same truth: that the serpent, like technology, is forever reinventing its skin.

Even the jewellery echoed that rhythm. The Serpenti Maharani Secret Necklace, the Apsaras, Ananta Shesha, and Jaipur Mirage revealed craftsmanship as choreography: each link articulated by hand, each join invisible, every hidden surface as exquisite as what the world sees. Turned upside down, the jewels remained perfect. The side that touches skin is treated with equal reverence, embodying mechanics and precision in its joinery and making the tactility of the objects just as desirable as their splendour to the eye. Their modular forms - heads detaching, coils reshaping - captured metamorphosis in material form.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who inaugurated the exhibition, calls Bvlgari 'provocative.' To provoke, for Bvlgari, is to awaken and to unsettle the smoothness of luxury.

Between Tokyo and Mumbai, between colour and serpent, Bvlgari staged a cultural experiment: to treat beauty as cosmology rather than commodity. SANAA’s translucent restraint and Anderson’s sensorial density may seem worlds apart, yet both articulate the same intuition - that beauty, at its boldest, thinks.

As I left Infinito, reflections multiplied endlessly; light, metal, body, serpent, each fragment looping back into another. In that mirrored continuum, Bvlgari’s world is no longer spectacle, but system, an argument for transformation as our most ancient, and most modern, instinct.

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Inspired by the open planes of Namibia, the collection, composed of 23 sets, emphasises contrast in its juxtapositions of striking styles, colours and form. Nature and light are translated into bold stones, from blue sapphires, which symbolise the sky, to onyx and diamond, referencing the stripes of a zebra, and pink spinels nodding to the fiery rays of a sunset. Also featuring zingy anodised titanium in blue, green and violet, and rich coats of black and brown lacquer, the jewellery is rooted in tradition, but ultra modern.

Says Valérie Messika, founder and creative director, ‘Instinct guided me here. Namibia showed me that beauty is born of contrast, brilliance against colour, power against softness. This chapter dares with new shades, but always keeps Messika’s light at its core.’

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The Swiss company has also introduced a partnership with New Balance, creating the (deep breath) TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E5 40MM x New Balance Edition, along with the new FuelCell SuperComp Elite v5 running shoes. With a natural focus on running, the New Balance Edition features bolder, tech sportswear influenced colours and materials.

The new smartwatch is available as a 45mm or the new 40mm size case, powered by TAG Heuer OS. This is the first time the company has developed a user experience and interface in-house. The intention is to create software with the same precision and craftsmanship as a mechanical watch, with a clean interface and intuitive navigation, along with greater battery life.

The new range of watch faces tap into TAG Heuer Connected history, with the first smartwatch launched almost exactly ten years ago. The original Connected Calibre debuted in 2022, and available faces on Calibre E5 reflect TAG Heuer’s close connection with Formula 1 heritage as well as its Carrera and Aquaracer models.

As before, fitness is a core driver of the new Connected Calibre E5. The brand’s Wellness Activity app tracks the most important movement metrics, along with calories burned and steps taken, with visualisations that show daily and weekly activity logs and goals.

There’s also a dedicated Heart Rate app that shows a live reading. Calibre E5 will also have sleep tracking, complete with breathing and heart rate data. Battery life can last up to three days for the 45mm model and two days for the 40mm.

Additional tracking functionality includes a focus on running and golf, with personalised running plans and tracking via a GPS sensor. A special Calibre E5 Golf Edition has a dimpled strap that mimics the texture of golf ball dimples, with integral course map displays (for 40,000 courses around the world) with an auto-scoring function.

The New Balance Edition features exclusive new watch faces, tailored training plans and a black DLC-coated titanium case and unique straps. Across the range, new straps are available in rubber, leather, metal, and nylon, with a new online configurator offering guidance through the many options.

TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E5, from £1,450, TAGHeuer.com, @TAGHeuer

Now, in its new form, produced by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, the brand’s Geneva-based fine watchmaking division, the 39mm yellow gold Monterey keeps Aulenti’s distinctive lugless form and crown at 12 o’clock but sharpens every detail. The case, polished to a mirror finish, catches light like liquid metal. Its widened crown, meanwhile, is notched with a Clous de Paris texture and crafted at La Fabrique des Boîtiers Louis Vuitton, the maison’s specialist case-making atelier. Underneath, a quick-release strap system engraved ‘1 of 188’ offers a discreet nod to the watch’s rarity.

The white Grand Feu enamel dial demonstrates the level of technical finesse behind the new Monterey. Its creation demands up to 20 hours of meticulous handwork and around ten firings at temperatures between 800°C and 900°C to achieve a subtle opaline depth. Red and blue printed scales trace the hours and minutes, echoing the colour accents of the original 1988 design, while slender syringe-style hands in white gold and a blued-steel seconds hand adorn the dial’s gloss surface.

Inside, the automatic calibre LFTMA01.02, with a 45-hour power reserve, replaces the quartz movement of the past. Conceived and finished entirely in-house, it features a circular-grained main plate, sandblasted bridges, and a rotor in 18ct gold trimmed with Vuitton’s V-notches.

'The Monterey represents a symbiosis between old and new,' says Matthieu Hegi, artistic director at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton. 'We’ve respected the design’s graphic codes while elevating it for today.'

That conversation between past and present extends beyond watchmaking. It’s echoed in Nicolas Ghesquière’s womenswear collections, where the creative director recently styled archival LV II watches from 1988 on the A/W 2025 runway, creating a subtle dialogue between the brand’s archives and its current offering.

The resulting timepiece is a faithful reissue that feels distinctly modern – more evolution than homage.

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By engaging with fields at the intersection of jewellery – art, architecture, fashion – Repossi has created a distinct aesthetic for the brand, foundations she builds on with the most recent collaboration with American-Dutch artist Sterling Ruby.

Friends for almost a decade, the collaboration felt natural to them both. ‘We had met several times through Raf (Simons ) and I of course always loved his work - to me he is the perfect American new minimalist artist after the past generation of Judd or Ed Ruscha,’ says Repossi. ‘He embodies a contemporary version and a versatility I absolutely admire and refer to. He is one of the most interesting artists in LA.’ Adds Ruby: ‘The Repossi approach to jewellery design is architectural, minimalist, but also open to disruption - that openness is what drew me in.’

The resulting piece of jewellery, a sharply-defined brooch, is constructivist in its silhouette. Crafted from 18 carat champagne gold, it looks to Ruby’s REIF series of wall-mounted sculptures in its elevation of humble forms.

‘My role with a collaboration is to express the idea of the artist and the collaborator and turn it into a jewel, obviously with my own take and vision,’ says Repossi. ‘The marriage of the two is what makes it particularly interesting. As a designer, my main goal is to reinvent classics, twist ideas and make new classics. In this particular case we transformed one of Sterling's recent sculpture series into a perfect reflective jewel, a unique piece made into limited editions.’

The pale champagne gold nods to Ruby’s vast pieces, such as baskets and purses, he has created in silver in the past. ‘But the slight golden shade recalls my designs,’ adds Repossi, ‘with the single top diamond encrusted in a more masculine way, as this versatile brooch, or pendant, is unisex. I’m known for large pendants in the past and was into the idea of making a large brooch too, the stacking of the “ bars” or splints echoes my designs.’

For Ruby, the medium was an organic one in which to work. ‘Working in high jewellery felt like a natural extension of my artistic practice. Whether I’m working in sculpture, ceramics, or clothing, I’m interested in shifting context; breaking hierarchies between disciplines. Repossi provided a space where those boundaries could be pushed, where jewellery could function as both object and artwork.’

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Throughout, Icardi has nurtured an interest in jewellery, launching her eponymous brand in 2020. Each piece, handmade to order in Italy, is created with her brother Lorenzo, a gemologist, and encompasses minimalist design and heritage craft. Julia Roberts is a fan – she sports a large selection of Icardi’s jewels throughout Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film, After the Hunt.

Icardi eschews perfection in her pieces, preferring to focus instead on organic forms. ‘I’m drawn to great taste, especially when it’s in contrast with bad taste. In 18ct gold, sometimes rawness and boldness can truly shape the object,’ she says of the offbeat style of her jewellery. ‘I’m always inspired by rediscovering classic pieces from the 1970s and 1980s archives. These are objects you remember, but they’ve been slightly reshaped with new proportions.’

Details are carefully considered throughout, from the ridges on a gold bracelet to a brilliant-cut diamond that sinks, effortlessly, into coloured stones. ‘Jewellery can come with many limitations, but rather than frustrate me, they actually stimulate my creativity. My brother helps when it’s time to judge stones and bring practicality to the development process. I love for my pieces to be worn during the day, mixed into layered wardrobe styling. A good wardrobe is, to me, a clear form of self-definition.’

Icardi relished the recent challenge of translating her jewellery for the big screen. ‘It was a pleasure to see my pieces on Julia Roberts,’ she adds. ‘Giulia Piersanti, the costume designer, chose to place the bracelet and ring to reinforce the character without overwhelming her. I enjoy every step of the creative process. It is always different, always guided by instinct and a reflection of my body.’

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With a democratic price point and riot of patterns, they mirrored the post-punk, New Romantic energy rippling through clubs and catwalks. Fast-forward four decades, and that same spirit is resonating again, with the vibrant Swatch Neon collection leading the way.

Here are six 1980s-worthy new watches on our retro wish list.

To mark 25 years of Ming, Lampson has produced a collection of 25 unique pieces, encompassing her distinctive bold and geometric rethinking of classic design codes. Through the collection, she considers the partnerships and collaborations that have defined her jewellery design, nodding to those she has worked with as well as to her west London neighbourhood, which has consistently fostered a spirit of creativity.

‘In this body of work, I examine what has been important to me over the last quarter of a century,’ Lampson says. ‘I reflect on how jewellery joins individuals, and my ties to my team and my clients, many of whom have become close friends. I consider my links to many countries and religions across the world through the global nature of the gemstone trade. These relationships and connections I represent through knots, twists and chains. I also wanted the one-of-a-kind jewels in [the collection] to say something about west London, where I have had a workshop for all my career.’

The creative and eclectic buzz of Notting Hill is translated into vibrant gemstones, recalling the colour of Notting Hill Carnival and the flower-filled gardens off Portobello Road. ‘There are also pieces that are a tribute to the influence of Asia in my life,’ Lampson adds. ‘I spent my early years in Hong Kong and later travelled and worked in the Far East. What I learnt there is fundamental to how I create jewellery and honour the materials and traditions of my art.’

While she has honed the construction of her jewellery, an experimental spirit still reigns. ‘It is always the gems that inspire and excite me, together with the challenge of innovation. To create what has not been made before.’

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Aaron first encountered Nymphenburg more than 20 years ago, when she was marketing director of Departures magazine. ‘I remember being so enchanted with the idea of a porcelain factory in a castle in Munich – I couldn’t get it out of my mind,’ she says over Zoom from her showroom in New York’s Diamond District. The concept stayed with her as she grew her jewellery brand, known for its utilitarian yet precious locks, and in 2017 she began emailing Nymphenburg. ‘I think I bothered them excessively,’ she adds.

Eventually, Ingrid Harding, head of development at Nymphenburg, met Aaron in New York and the seeds for a collaboration were sown. In 2022, Aaron visited the Nymphenburg manufactory, set within an ornate Cavalier House near the entrance to Nymphenburg Palace, where it has been located since 1761.

‘I sat in the archive and came across the “Cumberland” pattern, which is the most elaborate of all their dinnerware patterns. It’s $50,000 for a 12-place setting – it’s all hand-painted and the detail is just incredible,’ says Aaron. ‘It’s so rarefied, so extraordinary and so beautiful, I decided that more people need to know about it.’

The resulting limited-edition collaboration includes a ‘Depository’ (a ring-holder inspired by Aaron’s grandfather’s bill-stabber), a pair of earring drops like miniature dinner plates, a trundle bangle, and a supersized carabiner lock, all crafted in 18ct gold and hand-painted Nymphenburg porcelain – a labour of love for both workshops.

‘I can’t tell you how much trial-and-error there was,’ says Aaron, holding up a book of technical drawings. ‘Our engineer always says our pieces are a nightmare to produce because the mechanisms are so challenging and precise. It’s not like making normal jewellery.’

There’s an unexpected juxtaposition between the old-world floral porcelain, created for 18th-century Bavarian court banquets, and Aaron’s contemporary, utilitarian designs. ‘I’m also a real contradiction because I love very old things – my house is very maximalist, full of antiques. I’m like a dotty old English lady inside.’

The collection’s carabiner lock is strung on a Dyneema cord – stronger than steel and used for boat rigging – another Aaron lightbulb moment. ‘In the studio, we’re always thinking about the latest challenge that we’re trying to resolve. Our lens is always, “Are we obsessed with this notion?” Because if we are, we’re sure other people will be, too.’

The Marla Aaron x Nymphenburg collection is available at Liberty and marlaaaron.com from October

But how does this translate to the jewellery itself? For the second part of ‘The Perfect Drug’ collection, Martin brings the previously unseen to the fore, with a tough, hard-wearing functionality taking shape in chainmail, hooks and clasps. Punkish leather bracelets are pierced with studs of yellow gold, and soft grey pearls spikily cradle the finger. Diamonds are reverse-set, and orbs of ebony dangle from the earlobe. In Martin’s world, jewellery takes its cues from the counterculture.

Hannah Martin on punkish jewellery design

Wallpaper*: How does this collection build on the tough design codes of the first edition?

Hannah Martin: Both were born of the same emotion – they came out of the same world so to speak – but for me, ‘Drop 02’ takes things a step further into the industrial design codes. I saw it as a chance to double-down on what I started, amplifying what I started and doing it bigger and louder.

‘Drop 02’ definitely goes heavier into the harness/strap story (both soft and hard). And focuses on the studs and harness fixtures particularly – the ‘functional’ components of straps and harnesses. I have chosen to make design features the focal point, rather than just the ‘useful’ part that no one notices. I was playing with scale a lot, so a lot of these fixtures are very much over-sized and in-your-face big. I like that they are unnecessarily monumental in size; it feels rebellious in itself, and at the same time very luxurious.

W*: Can you tell us a bit about how you have utilised classic punk symbols?

HM: The ‘studded strap’ design story comes into its own in ‘Drop 02’, and is a very personal punk symbolism. Not only is it based on the leather wristbands related to this scene, it is based on a very specific one – my little sister’s. I found it when we were clearing out my parents’ attic, and the shape of it was so perfect, it still held her wrist shape after all the years she’d worn it, sweated in it, moshed in it. I love that it has made its appearance here, made of precious materials.

W*: The juxtaposition of metals and styles brings a very wearable coolness to the jewellery. Why did you want to embrace contrasting designs here?

HM: I always want people to wear the jewellery I design as part of their lives, not just for ‘special occasions’. I want the pieces to feel natural, with that slight DIY-punk vibe to them – like you’ve just picked something up and thrown it on, and it looks effortlessly cool, you know.

Mixing metals helps this. I wear all my metals mixed up, always have. There’s something much less formal about this. By doing this within the pieces themselves, it helps people loosen up to the idea. It also means you can wear these pieces with anything within your existing collection. For me, it is always about getting away from anything remotely traditional or expected.

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It’s not just the unique pattern that use of such material affords. 'For many customers it’s about having a watch with a material from so far away – from outer space – and which is so old,' reckons Walchli. For all that high-end watchmaking often embodies exquisite decorative arts alongside the impressive micro-mechanical engineering, the resulting watches are nonetheless human-made, 'whereas this is a material that gives the opportunity to wear something actually extraterrestrial on the wrist', he suggests.

Perhaps this is why Formex is not alone in joining what, Walchli jokes, 'can feel like the year of the meteorite' – which has also seen the likes of Girard-Perregaux, Czapek, Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Omega launch or relaunch watches with meteorite dials or details recently (often cut from the same two or three meteorites). And also why, to stand out, Formex has developed a proprietary process that accentuates the iron content of the meteorite material through application of an electro-plating treatment of gold, silver with a blue tint or, for its latest Space Ghost model, just silver. 'Most meteorite dials tend to end up looking just a bit grey, so we wanted to take a more experimental approach,' says Walchli.

Indeed, following the same concern for distinction, Chris Rose, of watch brand Diatom, argues that a more intimate connection with space now needs to go beyond just having a good back-story. That is, he concedes, for all that it helped establish the Omega Speedmaster – as famously worn by the late Jim Lovell to time a crucial phase of re-entry for Apollo 13 in 1970 – as arguably the definitive ‘space watch’, an association more recently parlayed into the Swatch Moonswatch series.

'Everyone knows that being in space is bloody hard and bloody expensive – it’s still a genuinely incredible feat. But that means an association with space stands above others. It’s why, in part, people still get excited by space,' says Rose. 'But I’m not sure a symbolic association is enough anymore. Customers are looking for a physical, tangible link to space.'

That’s why Diatom is aiming to take one small step – or a giant leap – onwards. Thanks to the company being the spin-off of a specialist engineering business called Sent Into Space, which promotes brands in the space environment, Diatom already takes every watch it makes into space – customers are able to link to footage of their individual watch making this flight. But for its forthcoming Inner Worlds range, launching in spring 2026, it will embed in the dial or hands of each automatic watch various certified space-related materials, including moon rock, Mars rock, part of the Atlas rocket used on Nasa’s Mercury missions, and part of the Apollo 13 capsule.

While such materials are rare and expensive, Sent Into Space’s connections have allowed it to gather enough from private collections to create, if not create entire dials (the material is often too frail for this anyway), then at least visible details. ‘These materials make for some great storytelling without just being a story. You can see them,' adds Rose.

As the second Space Race takes off – this time driven by private enterprise, from space tourism to the promise of space mining – might the watch world be entering its own space race? And might that be a step up from yet more ties to cars and planes? Andreas Bentele, head of marketing for Fortis, thinks so.

'Space is a small field within watches, which is one reason why any watch with a genuine connection stands out,' he says. Indeed, three years ago Fortis – which sponsors the Austrian Space Forum’s Mars simulation missions – became the first watch manufacturer to test one of its watches, the Stratoliner, in space, in conjunction with the Swedish Space Corporation.

'The idea was that if the watch can survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, vibration and so on that getting into and working in space entails, then it can survive pretty much anything on Earth,' Bentele adds. 'But getting that message across [and the credibility it implies] will take time, even if a lot of the products we use in daily life [cordless tools, memory foam, smoke detectors] work so robustly because they too were developed for use in space.’ Meanwhile, watchmaking’s earthbound inspirations remain so much easier to grasp. ‘The fact is that people understand diving.'

This is big news, as it is silicon that has gradually overtaken the 100-year-old Nivarox alloy as the material of choice for making the component that is the beating heart of a wristwatch, thanks to its stability over a range of temperatures and its imperviousness to the magnetic fields we constantly move through.

There’s a ‘but’, however, and that is silicon’s relative brittleness. It almost never happens, but silicon can crack under pressure and ‘almost never’ is too much for an industry that expects its products to work for decades. While makers such as Omega, Patek Philippe and Rolex have developed treatments that give silicon more strength, TAG Heuer has been working on an entirely new technology based on research into 'Carbon Infiltrated Carbon Nanotube-Templated Structures’.

The promise of carbon is a better security against environmental shocks, and grants more flexibility in designing the components, but along the way, there have been set-backs, cancellation threats, investment write-offs and more. Still, TAG Heuer promises that complementary technologies are in the pipeline and will feature in future collections.

Now, a decade since the project began, the TH-Carbonspring is in volume production with two limited editions being the first to utilise the new component: the Monaco Flyback Chronograph TH-Carbonspring and the Carrera Chronograph Tourbillon Extreme Sport TH-Carbonspring.

The details are suitably high-tech too, with the Monaco having black-gold-plated hour and minute hands filled with white Super-LumiNova, a black-gold small second hand and black forged-carbon indexes against a carbon dial. The Carrera has similar detailing but with lume-filled hour markers. Both are being produced in limited editions of 50. TAG Heuer says, with some justification, that this is the most fundamental development since the 17th century – and it might be right.

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Amongst a collection of extraordinary historical artefacts - including an Egyptian water clock from the Ptolemaic period, a spherical watch dating from the sixteenth century and an astronomical clock presented to King Louis XV in 1754 - there is a contemporary work from Vacheron Constantin.

The La Quête du Temps, created to mark the maison’s 270th anniversary is an exceptional astronomical clock, the result of seven years of work. ‘What is quite outstanding is that it is perfectly in perspective with the ancient artworks around, like another chapter added to an immemorial story, the search of beauty and the mastery of time,’ says Le Louvre curator Oliver Gabet.

‘Moreover, it is a contemporary expression of the idea of automaton, which has been so important since the Renaissance, and later in the 18th century. At the core, it is a celebration of craft and art, ideally embodied by the collections of the Louvre, and the talents of human teams, from the museum and from Vacheron Constantin, whose artisans and watchmakers have cultivated a unique expertise over centuries, blending time-honoured techniques with a relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence.’

Standing more than a metre high, La Quête du Temps encompasses over 6,000 mechanical components, and integrates the automaton into the timepiece itself to ensure a sharp functionality throughout. Pushing at the horological envelope, the timekeeping machine has resulted in the filing of seven watchmaking patents, and 8 for the automaton. As well as massive technical innovation, the focus is also very much on beauty, with an intricate aesthetic delicately bringing the cosmos to life.

The work was a natural choice for inclusion in the exhibition, and acknowledges a long and fruitful relationship between Le Louvre and Vacheron Constantin. ‘Among the several aspects the partnership has developed, from 2016, is the restoration and conservation of one of the treasures of the French national collections, the clock of the Création du Monde. If the Louvre is celebrated for his numerous, extensive and remarkable collections, from Archeology to Old Masters, we can admit his collection of clocks and mechanical art, and horlogerie, is much lesser-known,’; Gabet adds. ‘So the idea has been to gather, around a very unique dialogue between The Création du Monde, dated 1754, and La Quête du Temps, 2025, a small number of important artworks from our collection of horlogerie, to draw and unveil an unusual history of time and beauty.’

La Quête du Temps is to be unveiled as the centrepiece of exhibition, Mecaniques d'Art, at Le Louvre from 17 September to 12 November 2025

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Sardwell’s jewellery practice was not immediate. She studied sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design, and she still sees herself principally as an artist, with jewellery ‘a current expression of creativity’. However, there is a clear narrative thread that led her to her present juncture: ‘I was creating these large installations, and later started traveling and lacked space to do that. As a result, all my ideas about sculpture became smaller. They became sculptural objects, and then there was functionality thinking, and so they became jewellery.’

The jewels that Sardwell has become well known for are sculptural in form, and as compelling as still-life objects as much as they are when worn on the body. Her noted Curl Collection contains many visual and textural surprises. Everyday elegance is catered for in the Dream Loop earrings, while an edgier counterpoint is seen in the pearl and pave diamond set Curl ear cuff and arresting cocktail rings set in numerous gemstone iterations, or with coloured semi-precious stones. She fell in love with the latter during her time in Brazil and Argentina working in theatre. ‘I would go to markets and see tables filled with minerals and crystals and what is commonly theirs – amethysts and tourmalines and all the quartzes,’ she reminisces. Such memories are captured in her Bullet Rings that balance these natural treasures in delicately carved gold forms.

Cultural distillation and proposing new ways of spiritual and metaphysical connection underpin Sardwell’s process, one that she candidly shares is difficult. Indeed, Renisis as a name is a portmanteau of the Latin word ‘renitor’ meaning to struggle against and ‘genesis’ with its implicit meaning of beginnings. ‘I feel creativity is a struggle,’ she states, adding ‘to be in the right mental state, away from all of the demands of your daily life is one element of struggle and the other element of struggle is the actual process of not having self-doubt and to allow ideas to flow unhindered.’

Travel has been an integral part of Sardwell developing her own distinct design language, as too has her interdisciplinary creative path. She spent six years in Shanghai and traveling across China and Japan, which allowed her to observe an alternative aesthetic palette and absorb a different making methodology. Reminiscing about this pivotal time, she adds ‘looking at temples, at roofs that are curved and coming to points in unusual ways or the simple idea of a water drain cover on the ground that in Tokyo that is so beautifully designed with cherry blossoms I have since incorporated into my work.’

These ideas are further expressed in the Evidence of the Future collection, where from nomenclature to design Sardwell fuses notions of sacred spaces and architecture working in tandem to inform internal and external equilibrium. With the Guardian Temple Pendant, the back features carved patterns inspired by Japanese Shibori fabric from the Edo period that were worn as an undergarment. The Halo Lotus Double Ring is an invitation to meditate, with a South Sea pearl as central stone and the yellow shoulders set in pave diamonds and the Halo Wish arrow studs featuring inverted diamonds are a sartorial nod to Sardwell opting for novel ways to present the familiar.

In many ways Renisis can be viewed as both a jewellery house and a laboratory for Sardwell’s creative practice. It has provided ways of articulating a visual vocabulary that allows wearers in the words of the house’s strapline to ‘empower, transform and transcend’, yet is deeply informed by the founders myriad of experiences. For Sardwell, jewellery is ‘something that really incorporates and synthesizes elements of conceptual ideas and art that I really love such as performance, costume, theatre and sculpture.’ Thus, the pieces possess a dual role: adding to the stories we tell ourselves and assisting in the stories we tell others, when we decide to adorn ourselves.

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Available in English and French, the new 224-page publication was written by historian and watch expert Nicholas Foulkes, and chronicles the history of the Datejust. Foulkes highlights its significance as Rolex’s first waterproof, self-winding chronometer wristwatch with a date window – a timepiece that Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf described, at its launch in 1945, as ‘every discovery made to date’.

Alongside new and original photography, and historical images from Rolex, the monograph dives deep into the Datejust launch 80 years ago, and the addition of the Cyclops lens in 1953, and features Rolex testimonees highlighting the company’s partnerships with athletes and figures from the arts world. With individual access to the Rolex archives, Foulkes describes it as an honour to be entrusted to write the official history of a watch he considers Rolex's ‘most representative timepiece’.

‘The Datejust has always occupied a special place in the history of watchmaking, its essential aesthetic qualities acknowledged as the perfect synthesis of sophisticated design and timeless style,’ says Wallpaper* editor-in-chief, Bill Prince.

‘In this absorbing and meticulously researched book, Nicholas Foulkes brings this enduring icon to life, illuminating not just its technical achievements, but also the lasting impression it has made on generations of watch lovers worldwide. This collaboration between Rolex and Wallpaper* offers readers an invitation to rediscover a modern classic through fresh insights, previously unseen imagery, and a narrative as compelling as the watch itself.’

‘Oyster Perpetual Datejust – A Watch that Made History’ is available for international purchase: online exclusively at WallpaperSTORE*, for pre-order from 9 September and to buy from 29 September.

Encompassing necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings, the collection juxtaposes gemstones in sorbet shades for jewellery that eschews uniformity, rethinking classical line bracelets and drop earrings with sharp cuts and asymmetrical pairings.

Gemstones, including amethyst, aquamarine, madeira citrine, pink morganite and oro verde peridot, are teased into sharp angles or softly rounded orbs, cutting a very modern silhouette when studding the sensual coils of bracelets or dangling from earlobes.

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This article appears in the October 2025 Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Chanel is cautious, but curious, embarking on a trial voyage and arriving in New York in March, 1931, to a media frenzy. Stars flock to greet her (‘Two Queens Meet!’ trumpet the papers when she meets Greta Garbo) and she sets to work, creating the clothes for three films: Palmy Days (1931), Tonight or Never (1931) and The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932). The costumes, produced in the Chanel workshops in Paris, are shipped to Hollywood in a process supervised by Chanel’s employee, Mrs. Courtois. Goldwyn and his team are thrilled by the designs, but others find them too simple compared to the flamboyance more typical on the silver screen at the time. Chanel refuses to compromise on her designs, and the collaboration ends.

It is a brief, but significant, moment in Chanel’s history, now revisited almost a century later in the new high jewellery collection, Reach For The Stars. In its rainbows of precious gems, it recalls Hollywood’s golden era; specifically, the theatrical golden hour at the end of the day, when the sun sets and fills the sky with a vivid prism of colour. This cinematographic translation was a natural starting point for Patrice Leguéreau, director of the Jewelry Creation Studio, for his poignantly final high jewellery collection. ‘Patrice Leguéreau beautifully described how the colours that blaze at sunset and dawn inspired him to imagine pieces “kissed by the light of the sun,”’ says Dorothée Saintville, international product marketing director of watches and fine jewellery at Chanel. ‘It felt natural to base the collection around this fleeting moment because it encapsulates the glamour, radiance, and sense of freedom that are at the heart of Chanel.’

It is a mood which takes shape in the necklaces, earrings, rings, brooches, cuffs and tiaras of the collection, which nod to the lightness of Chanel’s clothes in their suppleness and intricate openworking. The three key motifs of the collection - the lion, the comet and, for the first time, wings - are themselves embodiments of the clean lines and sense of movement which characterised Chanel’s own creations. ‘To serve this moment, the vibrant and luminous tones of the gems are reminiscent of those of the sun at sunset and rising,’ adds Saintville. ‘There is an array of stones like yellow beryl, orange garnet, yellow diamond, ruby and sapphire, and for the first time in a high jewellery collection at Chanel, we present a Padparadscha sapphire of a rarity and exceptional quality, with a magical weight of 19.55 carats which reflects the rays of the sun at dawn.’

Old and new references unite in the pieces. There is a nod to the sole high jewellery collection Chanel personally created in 1932, ‘Bijoux de Diamants’, which celebrated the spiky outline of the star, a symbol she considered ‘eternally modern.’. The key comet motif, symbolising freedom, is lengthened and outlined in gold and onyx, while elsewhere the lion, embodying audacity, is drawn with a mane of dazzling stars, or set in clouds of white and yellow diamonds which hover over the fingers.

The inclusion of the new wings motif is inspired by Chanel herself, who said, ‘If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.’ Its high jewellery interpretation in lattices of gold, diamonds and precious stones recalls the delicacy of embroidery, the fluid silhouettes reminiscent of the flowing lines of Chanel’s couture.

Throughout, jewellery design is underlined by the same modernity which characterised Gabrielle Chanel’s unique interpretation of Hollywood glamour. ‘She introduced a new vision of glamour to Hollywood,’ says Saintville. ‘It was one rooted in freedom, simplicity, and the audacity to break away from ostentation. Gabrielle Chanel’s vision of glamour - sophisticated, pared-down, and resolutely modern - redefined the Hollywood aesthetic. But nothing is literal in a vision: it is an inspiration. It’s more like a wink, a tribute to her pioneering spirit and her ability to empower women, both on and off the screen.’

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This article appears in the October 2025 Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The Manchester-born former model Pauline, née Parry, began collecting art after opening a fashion boutique in Athens in the 1960s, where she met her husband, the shipping magnate Constantine Karpidas. Karpidas' collection is brimming with masterworks by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, as well as the furniture from her eccentric London home for a total over 250 lots. The sale is expected to fetch more than £60 million, the highest estimate ever placed on a single collection at Sotheby’s Europe.

Among the many highlights there is the Lalanne jewellery – the largest group from a single owner ever to appear at auction. Each piece was created by Claude Lalanne especially for Pauline over the course of two decades. They are bold, nature-inspired works of wearable art, rendered in a subdued palette of copper and silver, and brought to life through the process of electroplating. 'What makes this group remarkable is that it isn’t simply a collection of jewels, but a story of friendship, intimacy and creative exchange,' says Florent Jeanniard, Sotheby’s Chairman and Co-Worldwide Head of Design.

The jewels echo motifs – flowers, leafs, butterflies – that also appear in Lalanne’s furniture and sculpture. 'Both the furniture and the jewels are whimsical, surreal, yet profoundly personal. Just as the furniture was created to be lived with, the jewellery was conceived to be worn, always blurring the line between art and life,' Jeanniard explains. Copper, for instance, surfaces in both the jewels and the Structure Végétale bed, while botanical elements unfurl across bracelets, necklaces, and fantastical creations such as the 'Choupatte.'

Pauline’s connection with the Lalannes began in the 1970s through the gallerist Alexandre Iolas, and evolved from the initial collector-artist relationship to one in which Karpidas became Lalannes’ muse and lifelong friend. 'Their friendship gave rise to works that bear her name – Pauline’s Throne, Pauline’s Elephants, Pauline’s Table, Pauline’s Mouflon Bar – each a testament to the inspiration she provided,' Jeanniard notes. Many of the jewels were sparked by the simplest details – a flower in bloom, a leaf in the garden at the Lalannes’ farmhouse in Ury. As François-Xavier Lalanne once said of his wife’s creative spirit, 'she creates as the birds sing.'

Lalanne crafted the jewels using the same methods she did for her sculpture and furniture, namely electroplating. The procedure consisting in depositing copper or silver onto plates to capture the finest details, from the veins of a leaf to the texture of a petal. A soft patina enhanced the relief, lending each jewel an almost fragile feel. Jeanniard observes, 'the materials evolve gracefully, creating a surface life that simply enhances their beauty.'

Unique Lalanne jewels from the 1980s and 1990s rarely surface on the market. Many were bespoke creations for figures such as Pauline, Yves Saint Laurent, and the Rothschilds, often conceived initially as gifts. With Karpidas’s provenance, Jeanniard believes the estimates remain 'consistent and fairly conservative for unique pieces of this calibre.'

And if collectors are wondering which jewel to covet above all? Jeanniard resists the temptation to single one out, 'It’s almost impossible to choose because Lalanne’s work is so wonderfully paradoxical: endlessly varied, yet always recognisable, blending surrealism, poetry, utility, and decoration into an entire universe of their own.'

Pauline Karpidas' estate is set to go on sale at Sotheby's from 8-19 September

Now in its fifth year, the roster has swelled to include both heavyweight maisons and niche indies, as well as the founding independents. This year, newcomers like TAG Heuer and Bremont share the spotlight with acclaimed independents such as H. Moser & Cie, Ulysse Nardin and Czapek. The result is a unique alchemy of global giants, avant-garde independents and enthusiastic collectors.

From classic to avant-garde: highlights from Geneva Watch Days

TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph Tourbillon Extreme Sport TH-Carbonspring

For its Geneva Watch Days debut, TAG Heuer brought out the big guns, with the Carrera and Monaco as the headliners. The chronograph is a Carrera seen through the lens of material innovation, featuring an evolution of their TH carbonspring® tech now ready for serial production. This carbon-cased edition is a sculptural sports watch, with the woven carbon surface offset by a spiral-engraved dial that draws the eye inward. Sleek black tones dominate, but sharp details and luminous details ensure legibility doesn’t lose out to experimentation. The watch balances Carrera’s racing heritage with futurist monochrome, and unsurprisingly is feather-light on the wrist, a Carrera distilled into pure architectural statement.

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Octo Finissimo Lee Ufan x Bulgari

The Bulgari Octo Finissimo Lee Ufan Special Edition is a study in restrained geometry and materiality. Each 40mm titanium case is hand-filed to a textured, rough finish with overlapping deep and shallow cuts that juxtapose an ethereal mirror-effect in the dial with a vertical fume effect that shifts from grey to black. The signature octagonal bezel and integrated bracelet maintain the collection's architectural integrity. At the same time, the 2.23mm ultra-thin movement reminds us of how much micro-engineering plays a part in the Finissimo success story. Creating an unusual contrast, this marks the first time a steel bezel with radial brushing has been incorporated into the titanium case of the Finissimo. Limited to 150 pieces, this timepiece embodies a harmonious blend of sculptural form and minimalist design, reflecting Ufan's artistic philosophy.

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Bremont Supermarine

Bremont, with Davide Cerrato at the wheel, is asserting its role as a staunchly British take on watchmaking. We’ve seen a reinvigorated range of pilot watches in the Altitude range, and the team was out in force in Geneva with the latest version of the Supermarine 500M, their subaquatic alibi. As part of the renewed brand portfolio, the Supermarine features a crisp, polar white dial with a Grand Seiko-esque quality. It comes in 43mm contrasted by a matt black ceramic bezel, and on their best bracelet yet. The sweeping dune-like texture of the dial works well, and the case is rendered in 904L steel, a harder-to-machine steel used by Rolex, a step above most brands with its distinct lustre.

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Gerald Charles Masterlink

Fronting the singular look of a baroque-cased Genta legacy, Gerald Charles’ new gem set version of the Masterlink series focuses on slim geometry and proportion, then surprises with the dazzle of each bezel being invisibly set with sapphires or tsavorites. The stones form a seamless ring that underlines the quirky shape of the signature Masterlink case, with its softened square profile and curved “smile” at six o’clock. It has an architectural quality in its balance of curvaceous case with a strong linearity in the dial, which catches the light but remains a quiet contrast to the polished gem-set frame.

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Gerald Genta Geneva Minute Repeater

A favourite of the week was LVMH halo brand Gérald Genta, who presented a new Minute Repeater. Designed by Matthieu Hegi, the 40mm yellow gold case features ultra-thin walls—just 0.6mm at its thinnest point—allowing for optimal sound in a monochrome package, with a distinct end of last century style. The black onyx dial, with a minute track echoing the case's cushion shape, enhances the auditory experience and makes for a strong timeless look. Inside, the Calibre GG-002 movement, developed by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton's watchmakers Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas, delivers a crystalline chime. Only ten of these will be made, a timepiece that merges form, function, and sound in a harmonious architectural expression with an almost talismanic quality.

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Oris Big Crown Calibre 113

A colourful, retro-tinged sports watch, but with a business calendar? This was an interesting card put on the table by Oris in Geneva. With a lare 43mm case, Oris shows off its Calibre 113, yielding a watch that feels equal parts tool and design experiment. The steel case and oversized crown stay true to pilot watch codes, but the dial is a fun mix of minty green and pink, with an unusual day/date and yearly calendar making for a playful circle of information. A central pointer marks weeks of the year, while day, date, and month occupy neatly balanced windows, all tied together in mint green with rose-pink accents. Ten days of hand-wound reserve keep it steady and retro-architectural, serious in function with a joyful modern twist.

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Beda’a Angles

One of the busiest suites at the Beau Rivage hotel during Geneva Watch Days was occupied by Qatar-based brand Beda’a. The brand is run by its 30-year-old creative director Sohaib Maghnam and founder Hader Al-Suwaidi, and one of their debut creations is nominated for a GPHG award, the Oscars of the watch world. At Geneva they presented the perfectly sized new Mecaline version of the octagonal Angles, a 37mm big-lugged piece of minimalist chic. Sohaib has managed to distil the idea of a dress watch, keeping it within a slim 6mm case yet still managing to fit a manual wind ETA7001 movement.

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Zenith x USM Chronomaster Revival

Zenith has collaborated with modular furniture brand USM on the Zenith x USM Chronomaster Revival. The company launched its distinctive Haller system, using a ball-joint connector, in 1965, four years before the El Primero movement was unveiled in 1969. It is a shared history acknowledged in retro details including the warm yellow dial and a strong, graphic silhouette.

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Renaud Tixier Monday Organica

Dominique Renaud is known as an alchemist of horology; an inventor, rather than a watchmaker, demonstrated in the debut watch from his brand, Renaud Tixier. The Monday Organica offers a duality of mechanical craft and métiers d’art. Powered by Renaud’s RVI2023 Calibre, a highly innovative micro-rotor movement, the 7 pieces that will be produced all feature an intricate dial with blue tones by Olivier Vaucher. Each dial is the result of 112 hours of work that combines multi-level hand engraving, grand feu enamel, and textural effects that transform the surface into a miniature landscape. The enigmatic dial is housed in a hand-engraved scalloped 40.8mm platinum case with a thickness of 12.6mm, including a domed sapphire crystal.

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Ulysse Nardin Freak X Crystalium

The Freak watch is 24 years old this year, and Ulysse Nardin marks the anniversary with an embrace of glittering decorative arts. Framed in a black DLC suit, at the core of the Crystalium disc is ruthenium, a platinum-group metal which over days undergoes a slow, controlled vapour-deposition crystallisation process. The Crystalium hour disc, with its pointer positioned beneath the movement, serves as the hour hand, a subtle, continuous motion that fuses engineering and aesthetics. Due do the complexity of the Crystalium manufacturing process, it is only made in an edition of 50 watches.

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Laurent Ferrier Classic Tourbillon Teal Serie Atelier

Laurent Ferrier is the epitome of quietly spoken classicism, with no blustering or avant-garde flash. Instead, Laurent and a team that includes his son, Christian, have carefully honed a brand that represents a minimalist purity. Each case in the Classic collection is as smooth - and exhibits the same organic balance - as the pebble it takes inspiration from, this time rendered in 950 platinum. The distinctive lustre of weighty platinum frames a dark teal dial in grand feu enamel on a white gold base with the slimmest of Roman numeral markers. Only five pieces will be made, featuring the same LF619.01 calibre that won Laurent Ferrier a GPHG on its debut back in 2010, here in a more contemporary finish, with its beguiling tourbillon visible only to the owner.

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Furlan Marri Disco Volante Onyx

A highlight of Geneva Watch Days is the chance to discover small brands like Furlan Marri, know for their sub-£1K watches. The big retro wave might be less of a tsunami than five years ago, but last year’s trend of stone dials and shaped cases remain strong. Furlan Marri’s new Disco Volante takes its cues from Audemars Piguet UFO-shaped watches of the Fifties, with an organically layered look that frames a polished black Onyx dial. Underlining its dressy nature are baguette-cut lab grown diamonds for markers, and the slinky weave of a milanaise bracelet.

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Geneva Watch Days from 4-7 September

Making art from tiny bones wasn’t something that she considered possible as a career growing up in the commuter belt of Hertfordshire as the working-class child of a father who worked in IT and a mother who was a teaching assistant. Alignment to a trade loomed, but she resisted and found her way to Central Saint Martins to study Performance Design where the magic of scenography blew her mind. Design also felt safer than art but somehow obsession for the objects and materials themselves took hold and the multi-disciplinary artist she is today was born.

'Emma’s work touches on so many important ideas, our history, how we have become conditioned to think about how we place value. Our views on fragility and beauty,' says Trino Verkade, the CEO of Sarabande, an accelerator foundation for artists established by the late great fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen. While at Sarabande, Witter became homeless, and Verkade secured her a 6-month live-work residency with Selfridges which literally saved her. The web of collaborators, mentors and collectors is more vital now than ever for artists with the volatility of world markets scaring clients and an art market in the doldrums.

Then on July 3rd, her first solo exhibition for Fumi opened called ‘The Moon’s Daughter is a Pearl,’ inspired by the poetry of Anna Souter and the intertwining of art and ecology. Discarded oyster shells bathed in copper sulphate, distilled water and charged with electricity became textured metallic pearl keepsakes. Some clustered around mirrors, some acted as goblets and others as bowls in either black or reddish gold with a shimmering pearlescent inner world. The results are as mesmerising as if Witter with her wild red hair had collected scallop shells from the fictional world of Botticelli’s Venus.

To make something this beautiful out of waste has become her signature, transforming both her and the object. Her dream now is to start a large-scale production line where food waste like bone and shell could be deconstructed into artistic resources such as charcoal, inks and oils to create art, akin to Warhol’s legendary factory – but with food. This type of boundary-pushing is exactly why FUMI are showing her work according to Sam Pratt. “The art world’s pace pushes artists into a kind of hyper-productivity, often at the expense of depth, reflection, and a genuine engagement with craft and materiality. Emma’s work is the antithesis of that.”

The Moon’s Daughter is a Pearl by Emma Witter is at Gallery Fumi

Discover Piaget’s two new Altiplano watches

The new models are presented as an embodiment of the company's dual expertise as both a pioneer in delicately thin watchmaking and a master of goldsmithing and jewellery design. Both new models feature a distinctive khaki green and yellow gold colour palette and nod to Piaget’s self-proclaimed ‘extraleganza’, a fusion of extravagance and elegance.

The new Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon is an interpretation of the 2024 limited edition model. The cobalt alloy case is 2.0mm thin and, for the first time, it includes a sapphire caseback, allowing a view of the Caliber 970P-UC.

The Altiplano’s cross-shaped motif is attributed on the watch’s balance wheel and screws, an intricate nod to the design heritage. It is paired with a khaki green calfskin strap with a ‘Polish Mesh’ pattern. The Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon will also be part of Piaget’s ‘Infinitely Personal’ programme, which allows clients to co-create their own timepiece with custom finishes, materials, and engravings.

At 4.3mm thin, the Altiplano 910P is a new interpretation of the maison’s ultra-thin trademark. The case is made of yellow gold, and features a khaki green dial and matching alligator strap. Mirroring the Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon, the 910P also features the cross-shaped motifs on the dial screws.

Piaget’s two new additions are an ode to a nearly seven-decade heritage of the Altiplano collection.

The partnership began when Maximilian Büsser, the founder of M.A.D. Editions (the accessible, parallel brand to the out-of-this-world MB&F) was on the hunt for a future collaborator. While he was on holiday in summer 2023, he flicked through a magazine and landed on a feature on Ilori, and reached out. Six days later, the designer was in Geneva.

‘It’s been an incredible experience,’ says Ilori. ‘Two years in development, and now here we are. Although we’ve come from very different places, our stories have intersected, and we have created something very honest.’

The three watches centre round Ilori’s mantra, ‘Grow Your Dreams.’ Each watch – themed around the sun, nature and water – is limited to 400 pieces each, and available by raffle. Unlike sister brand MB&F, the watches are available at a more accessible price point at under £3,000 each.

'It’s different with MB&F, where the pieces can keep going up in price,' Büsser says. 'Here, we had to find ways to make it just as beautiful.’

As you would expect from Ilori, a master of colour, vibrant hues reign in the three watch designs. Cutting slim silhouettes – the rotor is slimmer than ever – the watches, crafted from titanium, have been subjected to an anodisation process, which has transformed the colour, stretching even to the inside of the bezel, filled with a colourful high-tech liquid ceramic.

'It’s been great working with Yinka, as he has so many ideas,’ says Büsser. ‘I send them to my team and we go, now how do we do this?'

The watches ascribe wholly to Ilori’s 'grow' philosophy, from the blades on the rotor, milled with a tree motif, to the motto etched on the surface. It is a spiritual finish for a project which has been meaningful for both.

‘These collaborations allow you the window of time where you can meet someone and create great memories,’ Büsser reflects. ‘It's the products that will survive me, but the memories are what I cherish.’

The price of the M.A.D.1S Grow Your Dreams watches before taxes is CHF 3,200 + VAT. The raffle runs from 2 -8 September. Registration is free. Register for the raffle here

Chesnais has built on these principles with a new collection centred around four principles, meaningful to her personally. Originally creating the pieces for herself only, she has expanded upon the designs to form the new ‘Joaillerie’ collection.

‘This creative process was, in many ways, both similar and different to my usual way of working,’ says Chesnais. ‘It involved a lot of volume research: wrapping, coiling around the hands and ears, while staying close to the spirit that’s defined the brand from the beginning. We wanted the pieces to feel immediately recognisable, to carry that signature. But there was also this huge constraint: the metal we worked with, 18ct gold. It pushed us creatively. [The results are] more stripped back, more introspective, but just as creative.’

The collection is divided into four themes: Round Trip, a reinterpretation of her classic gold sculptural curves; Serti Sculpte, which utilises the brand’s thread motif; Wave, where fluid pearls take centre stage; and Twin, created by Chesnais during her pregnancy with twins. ‘I never thought I’d fall for pearls the way I did,’ she adds. ‘But meeting a truly passionate pearl expert just swept me away. It’s wild to think the sea produces something like this. Even with human intervention, there’s something deeply fascinating about the way we perceive pearls. They're strangely moving, more than I ever expected.’

She affords a similar respect to diamonds, using them to outline golden silhouettes or placing them at the centre of a design. ‘With diamonds, it’s all about the brilliance. It’s like wearing a shard of light, a tiny piece of sun. I chose natural diamonds because I think there’s something dreamlike in that idea. Lab-grown diamonds, though more accepted now, feel a bit more… manufactured, less poetic. I work with responsible diamantaires, and for me, the natural diamond is still part of a story that feels magical.’

Throughout, jewellery stays faithful to Chesnais’ distinctive sensuality, which imbues works with a strong identity. They look as good resting on the dressing table before a night out as when worn. ‘There’s always this tension I explore, between the piece being worn and simply existing on its own,’ acknowledges Chesnais. ‘It has to feel good, sit right. The curve, the comfort, the ergonomics. The piece needs to be compelling at every scale.’

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Inside, watches exclusive to the boutique – from the Ingenieur collection and the new Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 Top Gun Miramar – sit next to a customer lounge and customisation studio.

To mark the new space, the brand has partnered with Boston-based textile artist David Nott, who has created a bespoke installation inspired by the sculptural form of the Ingenieur Automatic 42 in Black Ceramic. We speak to the designer about what inspired the design, and why IWC felt like a natural collaborator.

David Nott on his artwork for IWC Edinburgh

Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind your design?

David Nott: The design was deeply inspired by the iconic structure of the IWC Ingenieur. I’ve always been fascinated by objects that strike a balance between utility and elegance, and the Ingenieur does that flawlessly. It has this powerful, industrial presence - almost architectural in the way it’s constructed - yet there’s a quiet refinement to it as well. I was drawn to its visual rhythm: the symmetry, the strong geometry, and the way it carries its weight. That duality of strength and subtlety really resonated with me. I wanted to capture that energy in a completely different medium, reinterpreting the timepiece’s form and feeling in a way that felt fresh, tactile, and unexpected.

How do the architectural elements of the IWC Ingenieur resonate with your own work?

There’s a real alignment between the watch’s design language and the way I think about form and construction. The IWC Ingenieur is a masterclass in precision, from the exposed screws on the bezel to the intricately layered casing and the tactile quality of the brushed metal bracelet. Nothing feels accidental; every element is purposeful. That kind of rigor is something I try to bring to my own practice. My work often revolves around how small choices accumulate to create an object that feels alive and deliberate. With the Ingenieur, I found a framework that mirrored my own approach, where detail isn’t just embellishment, but the essence of the design itself.

What was important to you to convey in the design?

I really wanted the piece to feel engineered – like something that had been carved or machined rather than tufted from soft materials. There’s a fascinating tension in that idea, and I leaned into it. Texture became my primary language. Every bevel, every surface shift, every cast shadow was studied and considered. I wanted to echo the integrity and craft that go into making an IWC watch, while also challenging the traditional boundaries of textile art. For me, it wasn’t just about visual resemblance – it was about honouring the design’s spirit, the weight it carries, and the story it tells through form and finish.

How does it feel to have your work showcased in IWC’s first standalone Edinburgh boutique?

It’s honestly a huge honour. To be included in a moment like this, where a brand as storied as IWC opens its first standalone boutique in Edinburgh, feels incredibly meaningful. Seeing the work outside of the studio, in a space that celebrates precision, innovation, and legacy, is really special. It validates the countless hours of experimentation and refinement that went into this piece. IWC’s commitment to design excellence set the tone for the entire project, so to now see the final work living in that same world feels full circle in the best way.

What have you enjoyed most about the process?

Without a doubt, the most rewarding part was interpreting the watch’s dimensionality in yarn – translating hard, technical surfaces into something soft and expressive. That process challenged me in all the right ways. Every line, every edge needed to be thought through from a sculptural perspective, not just a visual one. I also loved the contrast inherent in the project: taking a cold, engineered object and reimagining it through a warm, tactile medium. That interplay between precision and softness is something I’m always chasing in my work, and this collaboration really gave me the space to explore it fully.

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In 1969, Seiko introduced the Speedtimer, an automatic chronograph equipped with impressive accuracy. The same year, the high-performance sports car, the Datsun 240Z, was released to international acclaim. A collaboration, then, felt natural, and the brands teamed up. In 1971, when the Datsun 240Z competed in the world’s toughest race, the East-African Safari Rally, it was in a car emblazoned with the Seiko logo.

Today, the brands are revisiting their partnership with the release of three limited-edition watches inspired by the design of the 240Z car. In red and black, each dial design echoes a different form of the Datsun logo, from its colourful geometric shapes to the name in cursive script. Useful features, including a countdown timer function used to measure key periods in competitions, such as the target durations for tasks like tyre changes and refuelling, join details such as the tachymeter scale on the outer bezel, nodding to both the original Speedtimer design from 1969 and the sharp technicality that undercuts both brands.

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Additive manufacturing is the umbrella term for creating three-dimensional forms by layering material, covering a range of techniques from binder jetting to material extrusion. 3D printing, meanwhile, refers specifically to producing physical objects from digital designs using a 3D printer. In essence, all 3D printing is additive manufacturing, but not all additive manufacturing is 3D printing – making the former a broader, more versatile realm of innovation.

Debuting this week is the 3D-printed watch Gen1.0 from Apiar. At first glance, the Gen1.0 has all the traits of a regular wristwatch in Apiar’s moody shots, but its textured, web-like case structure could only be made using generative design. While Dutch brand Holthinrichs has been making 3D-printed metal cases for some years now, Apiar goes further. In a world first, the Gen1.0 mid-case and dial are also being made through the same process, crafted in titanium and with two different colour choices visible through a textured, skeletonised dial, itself an integral part of the round case.

The metal used for Apiar’s new Gen1.0 is the strong yet light grade 5 and 23 titanium, with the bezel being the only part that is CNC machined rather than made through additive manufacturing. The result measures in at an eminently wearable 39mm, and comes with a traditional movement from La Joux-Perret.

Co- founder and operation director Sam White says: ‘I’ve always loved cars and watches, because they exist at the intersection of performance and beauty. Both are tools you can depend on, yet they’re also art forms you can admire. Additive manufacturing lets us push both sides of that equation, delivering components that perform at the highest level, but which are also inherently beautiful. We’re embracing that aesthetic potential, while never losing sight of the function that makes it all possible.’

Apiar’s approach is inherently sustainable, with the additive manufacturing process doing what its name implies, adding material where needed, rather than cutting away and discarding metal from solid blocks. ‘Additive manufacturing opens up our design canvas, allowing us to think, design, and create the Gen1.0 with geometries once considered impossible,’ says Matt Oosthuizen, co-founder and managing director. ‘These are complex, organic, and overlapping surfaces that a traditional CNC machinist would never attempt. By adding material only where it is needed, we achieve a far more efficient buy-to-fly ratio, with the Gen1.0 wasting just 14 grams of titanium across the midcase, dial, and caseback.’

With orders opening this week and priced at £2,250 incl.VAT, the Gen1.0, offers a glimpse into a more organically shaped future.

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‘I'm fascinated by the power of the sprout, or what is known as germination (the process by which seeds grow),’ says Bergström. ‘It's so fantastic how a seed can sprout and totally smash through an asphalt road. Nature always finds a way and it can be both inspiring and scary, how a tiny organism can make such a big impact. I want the pieces in the collection to be strong yet soft; to wear them is to be a part of them.’

The ‘Itu’ collection, made in Kalevala’s Helsinki factory using recycled premium-quality silver and gold, draws on Bergström’s sculptural sensibilities in its curving forms and textured surfaces. Encompassing necklaces and earrings, it is a gentle nod to the organic patterns in nature.

‘What I find especially fascinating is seeing how the organic themes are transformed into jewellery by the skilled hands of Kalevala’s goldsmiths,’ Bergström adds. ‘The spirit of Finnish nature, the moon cycles and historical elements endlessly inspire me. The collection features a rich variety of jewellery, multiple interpretations, each drawing from the same core theme in its own way. I want the jewellery to come alive when worn, to be loved and treasured.’

The jewellery draws on the heritage of the brand. Founded by women, it began with an initiative from writer Elsa Heporauta, who wanted to build a statue to honour a Finnish woman at a time when statues were reserved for men. To fund the project, artisans made and sold jewellery, the proceeds of which then went to support women and children upon the outbreak of the Winter War (with the Soviet Union, lasting for the winter of 1939-40). Almost a century later, the spirit of community remains, with a third of all profits supporting disadvantaged women in a range of initiatives.

‘Kalevala has been a pioneer in the jewellery industry for 88 years,’ adds Aino Ahlnäs, creative director of Kalevala. ‘The “Itu” collection pays homage to that long-standing spirit of courage while introducing something fresh to our range. With its rich textures and playful combinations of materials, the collection is designed to be worn, cherished, and perhaps one day, passed on. The inherent themes of “Itu” resonate with turning points in life – growth, hope and transformation.’

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But why Snoopy? ‘I really can’t explain the appeal of Snoopy in particular,’ concedes Orient’s product manager Matt Clifford, ‘and on paper it’s a strange thing to find a 1950s comic strip character on a modern mechanical watch, and right across the price spectrum too. Sometimes it’s the seemingly very random brand crossovers that work best because they’re so unexpected, though Snoopy – an entertainment phenomenon – has certainly developed this wide appeal in the watch world.’

That, he argues on further thought, is in part because it’s not easy to find an IP, an intellectual property, that’s not contentious, or not so closely connected to one particular culture so as to make global sales challenging. Snoopy – simply-drawn, in black and white – isn’t so bold as to detract from the design of any watch the droopy-eared beagle finds himself on.

The emotional tug of a Snoopy watch

But George Bamford, of Bamford Watch Department – which has just produced a ‘Crazy Love’ Snoopy edition watch with Frank Muller (priced £28,800 and sold out), and which has previously made Snoopy editions for Harrods, Goodwoof and Dover Street Market – suggests that appeal is more deeply emotional.

‘It’s not just nostalgia. There’s a mass resurgence of character watches [from Hello Kitty to Popeye, Babar The Elephant to the Muppets, Pokemon to Mario and, of course, the OG Mickey Mouse] because they make you smile, which we all need in these interesting times,’ says Bamford, who has an office full of Snoopy memorability and a 6ft-tall soft toy version at home. ‘But out of all of them, Snoopy has that cool factor, in part because the licensee has built the IP’s presence so well and allowed it to be interpreted with more freedom.’

One of Snoopy’s most popular alter egos is Joe Cool, points out Vishal Tolani, director of Dartmouth Brands, owner of aviation-inspired watch brand AVI-8. Indeed, that Snoopy has multiple such alter egos – tennis player, explorer and painter, to name just a few – only adds to the character's design versatility. AVI-8 recently launched its own limited-edition range of five Snoopy designs, aptly featuring the dog in his ‘flying ace’ guise and coming in a doghouse-shaped box.

‘Snoopy has been marinating in the public consciousness for so many years that, among all the characters, it’s one of the best able to resonate in different ways and so reach as many people as possible,’ says Tolani. ‘That means the economics [of paying to use such an intellectual property] can make sense. Effectively, you’re paying rent on a brand that gets you an audience. They might not have heard of AVI-8 but they have heard of Snoopy.’

That Snoopy has almost become as much a cult subject on watch dials as off it – and likewise been co-opted by countless streetwear and accessories brands too – might suggest we’re at peak-Peanuts. Armitron was the first watchmaker to put Snoopy on a dial, in 1956, though arguably it wasn’t until the acclaimed watch designer Gerald Genta started using characters, the likes of Donald Duck and the Pink Panther, on high-end watches from 1984 that the idea was taken seriously by watch enthusiasts.

Peanuts characters have since been seen on watches from, among others, Seiko, Swatch and Omega. In 2003, Omega created a Snoopy Speedmaster inspired by NASA’s Silver Snoopy Award, given for an outstanding contribution to mission success and launched in 1968 with Schultz’s enthusiast support.

And, indeed, Clifford says that Orient had some reservations about the risk of its new take being disregarded as just another Snoopy watch – which is one reason why, for a point of differentiation, Snoopy’s yellow bird friend Woodstock also makes an appearance at the start of each month, the first time a Peanuts character has been used on the date wheel.

But maybe the options are limited. Shawn Lawson Cummings, senior vice president of innovation for Timex – which returned to the Snoopy licence earlier this year, with a three-hand model with a golfing Snoopy image, and a GMT with a driving Snoopy one – argues that while there are many comic or cartoon characters a watch company might pull from, very few have just the right resonance. Snoopy almost stands alone.

‘Mickey Mouse is up there,’ she says – Timex launched its first Mickey watch in 1933, ‘but there really aren’t many that you can put on a watch for an adult as well as a child. The character has to have substance. It has to stand for something [that transcends its inherent kiddiness] – and Peanuts is an ever-green iconic property communicating an optimism that crosses generations and cultures.’

He is referring specifically to past watches designed with the likes of Shantell Martin, Alain Silberstein and Stefan Sagmeister, and now the two new limited edition Art Watch Type 8 watches, co-created with the German sculptor and painter Daniel Engelberg, whose abstract work focuses on the use of colour gradients. Mintiens discovered Engelberg’s work at a Belgian art fair and saw its application for a watch dial immediately, not least because, like Ressence’s patented signature Orbital Convex System display, Engleberg’s Inside Out series of works comprise discs rotating around a central point.

'It was clear to me that the graphic language of his work matched with that of Ressence, not least because, from a practical point of view, the black barriers with which he separates his choice of colours was [transferable to a Ressence dial, from which material is milled out and then filled with pigment, in this case blue Grade-A Super-Luminova],' says Mintiens. He also liked the 'positivity and forward-looking nature' of Engelberg’s work and how it might allow Ressence to further stand apart from 'the majority of brands with their nostalgia about the past.'

Rather than having to follow a brief to select a more approachable palette, Engelberg was given free reign in his choice of colours – hence the more striking of the two designs, with a gradiated blue central section with a three layer surround in shades of pink: 'not an obviously commercial choice, comprising colours that would be hard to put together if they were clothing, at least not without looking like a clown,' laughs Mintiens. Since Engleberg blends his own paints, the only challenge was the pigment manufacturers reproducing them without the aid of Pantone references.

'I tend to select colours on instinct, and as an artist I have the luxury of thinking about colour without the need for it to have any purpose,' says Engelberg, who admits to never wearing a watch, or any jewellery himself ('Just clothes,' he adds). 'Colour enriches your mind if you just allow yourself to dive into it. A lot of people are funny about abstract art – so what’s been exciting for me is the idea of seeing it translated into an everyday object like a watch [and thus made more approachable]'.

From a business viewpoint, Mintiens explains that such art projects allow for watches to find distinction in an over-crowded market, especially with such bold use of colour standing apart from the industry’s usual leanings towards black, navy, grey and white dials – necessarily muted, arguably, to sell a sufficient number of pieces. 'Not all brands can make art watches like this simply because they need to appeal to a mainstream watch consumer,' he argues. 'But we sell to a lover of product design, more than of watches, and the codes that appeal to that consumer are very different.'

Does a watch brand collaborating with an artist move certain models closer to being considered artworks in their own right? Certainly bigger brands have also experimented with art watches: for the last five years Zenith, for example, has collaborated with Felipe Pantone - an artist also recognised for a chromatic style - most recently on its Defy Skyline Tourbillon. This has a star-shaped oscillating weight, with oil slick effect PVD coating, visible through a partially open-worked dial. Hublot has collaborated with Richard Orlinski, Samuel Ross, Takeshi Murakami and, as of last year, Daniel Arsham, who co-created the Droplet, a contemporary pendant/pocket watch for the brand. In 2024 Audemars Piguet worked with Kaws, Bulgari with architect Tadeo Ando and conceptual artist Laurent Grasso.

'The fact is that we have designers working in-house for our main collections, but drawing designs from artists specialist in other fields can give us the kind of creative input we need for special editions. The outcomes reflect that thinking outside of the box,' explains Adrian Bosshard, the CEO of Rado, which has collaborated on versions of its True Square and other watches with the likes of Evgenia Miro, Yuan Youmin, as well as names from the worlds of fashion and industrial design, Marina Hoermanseder, Kunihiko Morinaga and Tej Chauhan among them. Launched not as limited editions, Rado chooses rather to keep these models available for up to three years.

'The people we work with have to understand the brand, and that means we have to be very selective with those we work with,” Bosshard adds, 'but their colour combinations, choice of finishing or dial shape make for ideas that most probably our internal designers wouldn’t have come up with. And in turn they attract a new customer to Rado, those who might otherwise not consider it.'

Mintiens is rather scathing about many art watches – 'just taking a poorly executed Picasso copy and reproducing it on a too-small surface, then putting a hole in the middle of it,' as he puts it – but argues that, done well, magic can happen. 'It’s the blending of two universes, and if you do do it well you don’t end up with just a distinctive watch but a dynamic piece of art, with a function,' he reckons.

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Trau, who began her career as a diamond buyer, has always been drawn to the unique sentimentality of vintage jewellery pieces, long before she knew what to look for. ‘I'm a lot more in the know about what I pick up for inspiration now. I look for very specific things that have something slightly unique. I'm not era specific, although I do love Victorian jewellery the most as it's by far the most sentimental.’

Trau draws on an eclectic process when translating a piece from inspirational to new, sometimes adding diamonds or a modern chain to a historical piece, or paying tribute to its design in her own works. ‘Good jewellery design has to be something that is wearable and comfortable,’ she adds. ‘While jewellery design is an art form, it's a wearable art form and that’s something that I never forget. After that, I think it's about making something that feels fresh. Since jewellery is such an ancient art form, it's hard to design things that feel unequivocally original, but I think it's about imbuing a point of view that feels decidedly unique.’

Trau’s jewellery encompasses chains, which rethink traditional mid-20th century links, to interchangeable charms and standout one-of-a-kind pieces. ‘I constantly go back and forth between light and chunky,’ Trau says. ‘I want my pieces to feel comfortable and wearable, like a second skin. You should be aware that you're wearing it, but you should also forget you have it on because it's so easy to wear. Sometimes that can be a challenge because from idea to execution, from one-dimensional sketches to finished pieces, the goals seem to change.’

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Carved from white, rose and yellow gold, and decorated with coloured lacquer and diamonds, it turns gently on itself before disappearing once more, uniting jewellery craftsmanship with intricate mechanics. At its heart is the work of François Junod, the Swiss automaton-maker who has been collaborating with the French Maison since 2017.

Junod was born in 1959 in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland, a village in the Jura mountains with a long tradition of mechanical craft. 'I was born into a family of mechanics,' he says. 'My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all grew up in this mechanical environment.' His formal training combined studies in micro-mechanics at the École Technique in Sainte-Croix with a sculpture and drawing degree from the Lausanne Art School. That dual focus is reflected in his work today, which merges engineering with visual storytelling.

He first encountered the world of automatons as a teenager, apprenticing under a French craftsman named Michel Bertrand, who moved to the village in the 1970s. 'It started with a meeting,' Junod recalls. 'Michel Bertrand came to settle in my village through his son Frédéric Bertrand who was in my class at secondary school.' That early encounter shaped a career now spanning more than 40 years.

Junod’s work is defined by a refusal to hide its mechanisms. 'In old automatons, the mechanism was often hidden to avoid revealing the secrets of their manufacture,' he says. 'Today, I prefer to show the mechanisms as much as possible – to see the spectacle that is kinetic poetry.' His automata make visible the gears and cams driving their motion. 'The poetry of movement is seen through the finish of the components, the design and symbolic aspect of certain pieces, the proportions and the finesse of execution.'

His collaboration with Van Cleef & Arpels began with Fée Ondine, an automaton unveiled in 2017. A fairy perched on a lily pad animates alongside a butterfly and blooming flowers, with all components working in precise harmony. 'The most challenging part was designing the mechanisms related to jewellery, such as the butterfly and the fairy,' says Junod. 'It was necessary to achieve smooth movements with fairly heavy materials like gold, but also to design articulations without revealing the mechanism. To maintain the poetry and enchantment, the synchronisation of the movements between them had to be perfect, as did the opening system of the two corollas.'

Junod’s latest automaton, Naissance de l’Amour, continues this blend of disciplines. Around 30 centimetres high, it centres on a sculpted Cupid with fluttering plique-à-jour enamel wings, who emerges from a basket of feathers with a lacquered colour gradation before retreating into a shell-like chamber. The basket rests in a bowl carved from petrified palmwood, supported by a base of iron eye stone. Time is indicated by a rotating ring at the base, using two lacquered feathers set with diamonds and fixed in place by a diamond-set bow. The mechanism was developed in Junod’s workshop in Sainte-Croix in collaboration with the Maison’s craftspeople, and follows a series of automatons created with Van Cleef & Arpels, including Rêveries de Berylline, Éveil du Cyclamen, and Bouton d’Or.

'My personal projects don’t allow me to do high jewellery,' Junod says. 'It’s a separate profession, but the two together allow me to create extraordinary objects.' The partnership with Van Cleef & Arpels fulfilled a long-held ambition. 'It’s a dream I’ve had since I was young, when I used to stroll around Place Vendôme,' he adds.

Each piece begins with an idea, not a blueprint. 'It is first and foremost an artistic vision with a story to tell,' he says. 'I often start with several ideas that I put together, like a chef preparing a new recipe. Then comes the technical concept, with one or more magic effects. It takes a certain amount of imagination to visualise an automaton in your head before it's built.'

Van Cleef & Arpels has a long history of creating mechanical objects, from powder compacts and beauty accessories to kinetic sculptures. These latest automatons continue that lineage, reviving a tradition from the late 18th century that had largely disappeared. 'Automatons were often created by renowned clockmakers, with support from painting, sculpture, or jewellery,' Junod explains. 'They disappeared with the advent of electricity. I like the idea of restoring the nobility of this forgotten art.'

He never expected automaton-making to re-emerge. 'I’m delighted this is happening, after more than 40 years practising this fascinating craft. Reviving an extraordinary art gives real meaning to my quest for perfection.'

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Set in 39mm white gold cases, the watches feature dials crafted using figurative guilloché, a technique developed in-house. Departing from the abstract patterns typically associated with guillochage, these dials depict recognisable zodiac symbols – from Aries to Pisces – alongside their corresponding constellations, marked with brilliant-cut white diamonds. Four of the signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Aquarius) include opaline detailing to further enhance the engraving.

Each blue dial, laid over a sunburst-finished gold base, is framed by a halo of 96 baguette-cut blue sapphires - around 3.87 carats in total - set into the bezel, lugs, crown and clasp. Channel-setting allows the sapphires to form a seamless ring of colour, echoing the circular motion of the heavens. Applied white gold hour markers and a Maltese Cross complete the layout, while a dark blue alligator strap reinforces the celestial theme.

The guilloché surface itself is composed of tiny triangles formed by dense, chisel-traced lines. Each dial takes around 16 hours to complete, with the guillocheur varying angles and pressure to achieve the kind of curved motifs rarely seen in traditional engine-turning, a technique more commonly associated with geometric patterns.

Powering the watches is the Calibre 2160 - Vacheron Constantin’s ultra-thin, self-winding tourbillon movement, measuring just 5.65 mm thick. A peripheral rotor ensures an unobstructed view through the open caseback, revealing details such as Côtes de Genève finishing, hand-bevelled bridges and a tourbillon cage shaped like the maison’s signature Maltese Cross. Certified with the Poinçon de Genève, a hallmark of excellence, and offering an 80-hour power reserve, the movement rewards close inspection as much as the dial itself does.

'We decided to take a look at erotic watches again but from a different position, so to speak,” says Hugo Lesizza, Perrelet’s international sales and marketing director, quipping inadvertently. 'Erotic watches have long been traditional [in style] and we wanted to create something more contemporary, to match the design of the watch, but also more fun and disruptive. With the turbine blades still it’s as though the image has been censored. But it becomes a real talking point when the image below them is revealed'.

Indeed, while Perrelet has used its Turbine design to offer a peekaboo display of imagery on its dials before - focused around abstract patterns and art works - it seems born to be used with more titillating imagery. 'Hentai is easy to play with, because it’s so graphic [not necessarily in the sexual sense] and is part of a recognisable comic-book culture,' says Lesizza. Certainly, it’s part of a much older culture too – because whiles Perrelet has been dabbling in erotic watches for some 15 years, erotic watches – as the watch industry somewhat coyly prefers to call them – have been a niche interest since the 17th century.

Historically pocket watches – and later wristwatches – would be commissioned and worn by the waggish and well-to-do to entertain – and, given that they could be highly satirical, perhaps also to shock - polite company. It was a conversation starter in a society for which all erotica was consumed very much behind closed doors. Open sales of erotic watches tended to increase in line with the libertinism of the times - under the French monarch Louis XV, for example – and likewise they somewhat faded from view with the advent of the Victorian era.

Certainly only a few brands still dip a toe - or any other protrusion - into the world of the erotic. Blancpain and Chopard have historically taken a more subdued approach but containing their watches’ erotic content to a scene on the case-back. Richard Mille’s aptly-named RM69 of 2019 toyed with the idea, through text rather than imagery. But others makers have been more bullish.

Last year Ulysse Nardin - which started producing erotic watches in the 1980s, as one way out of the quartz crisis – released a series of watches, each limited to 40 pieces, with hand-painted dials by the Italian comic book artist Milo Minara – among whose most famous works is Il Gioco, about a device that renders women helplessly aroused, and whose collaborators have included Federico Fellini, Neil Gaiman and Marvel. It has previously made highly-complex automaton erotic pieces in which the subjects depicted in flagrante on the rose gold sculpted dial move to and fro with each hour strike of the minute repeater action.

Similarly, the independent watchmaker Svend Andersen has produced watches with flip-top cases revealing automaton erotica underneath, one involving a cartoony Bill Clinton “not having sexual relations with that woman” Monica Lewinsky. Earlier this year one of Andersen’s erotic pieces - involving depicting the underwater meeting of a scuba diver and a mermaid - sold at auction for almost £29,000, twice the estimate. Jacob & Co has also made automaton pieces, with a dial cover and dedicated crown to reveal the sex scene below.

But despite these watchmakers making various efforts to give their watches’ erotic potential, Lesizza concedes that such pieces are made in limited editions in part because there are some barriers to selling them. 'For many brands the idea of the erotic watch is too risqué - it just doesn’t fit with their public image as they see it,' he says. 'And some retailers are reluctant to stock these kinds of erotic pieces too. When we demonstrate how collectors are after them they can sometimes be persuaded - though we don’t even try to make that argument in [religious] countries.'

Are erotic watches a dying breed then? Has the ubiquity of pornography taken the edge off the erotic watch’s appeal? Maybe, through Lesizza argues something else. Erotic content may be one way for watches to stand-put in an increasingly crowded market, but 'my feeling is that very few brands will continue to make erotic watches because I think society is actually becoming more conservative again.'

It is a history Hardy is drawing on with the launch of the new Chaîne d’ancre collection, which subverts a familiar form with a reinterpretation of the classic heavy link. Elongated, maximised, rounded, lengthened - silhouettes here are gloriously eclectic, in simply minimalist rings or in rows of juxtaposed styles wound around the neck.

Functionality is a key component of the design throughout, with the clasp, worn at the front, central to the aesthetic. A link can become an earcuff, or jumbled together to form a minaudière, worn swinging from the shoulder.

‘This collection is about an icon of the Maison,’ Hardy adds. ‘We focused on a single object, like we did in the Kellymorphose collection in 2021, which was inspired by Kelly's locks and brought out all the potential and messages it contained.’

Nautical and fluid references here, too, are faithful to Hermès’ historical references. ‘There are a lot of stories and messages in it. Among them, we can think of the robustness and fluidity, or solid and liquid, reminiscent of the origin of the motif, the maritime theme. The chain is both strong and fluid, like the flow of water. Thanks to this, we were able to emphasise the robustness within Chaine d'Ancre while also highlighting the chain's smooth movement, which became a great theme. Depending on the materials and the presence of diamond settings, we were able to meet Chaine d'Ancre in completely different forms.’

When cast in white and rose gold, and studded with diamonds, spinels or sapphires, the chain takes on a seductive new identity. ‘Accumulating, merging and fluidifying, I explored several territories starting with the archetypal form,’ adds Hardy.

An emphasis on the finest materials (think 18k gold, lusciously large diamonds and a rainbow of gemstones) make a luxurious foil for an urban grunge that runs throughout. Farrugia, who has cited as inspiration both Rick Owens’ sleek minimalism and artist Kazimir Malevich’s abstract silhouettes, puts a spin on traditional jewellery forms with maxi proportions, sharp stone cuts and offbeat placements.

In this Curb chain, a rethinking of classic techniques takes shape in tightly knitted links of gold and a dazzling pear-cut diamond, flipped onto its side in a sensual subversion of the central stone.

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This article is in the August 2025 US Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 10 July 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today