What was ticking at Watches & Wonders 2024

From exciting releases to the return of glamour, this year’s biggest releases prove there’s something for everyone.

Creativity abounded in Chanel's watch launches at Watches & Wonders this year.

Watches & Wonders, the world’s largest watch fair – and this year with 54 brands showing and 49, 000 visitors, the biggest yet, has wrapped in Geneva.

Brands to show their new novelties for the year included Rolex, which made history in 2023 by becoming the first Swiss watch brand to surpass 10 billion Swiss francs in sales, capturing 30 per cent of the market share, Tudor, Cartier and Chanel. New additions included British brand Bremont and Raymond Weil and a slew of independent brands such as H. Moser & Cie and Nomos Glashutte.

Despite talk of a slowdown in growth for the watch world, the brands offered little sign they were feeling especially cautious.

Indeed as Hublot chief executive Ricardo Guadalupe, who says he expects there to be a normalisation in the industry following the covid luxury boom, the brand will continue to invest in creativity and innovation.

“We continue to invest at the same pace during the past year, it’s not that because it’s a bit less good at the moment that we will stop investing,” he says, noting that the brand will open a new manufacture to expand the production of its high-end pieces in the next three years.

The idea that watch brands are increasingly catering to the ever important (and evermore courted) top tier client – the ones not especially concerned with the cost of living crisis – was evident in the releases this year. Solid gold – the ultimate watch of the ultimate closer was a key trend, spied at Rolex (including on the Perpetual Deep Sea dive watch which is compellingly extravagant), Patek Philippe, new green dial Vacheron Constantin and for the first time, Tudor had a fully solid gold watch with a new version of its Black Bay 58. Precious gemstones and mind bogglingly complicated watches were on high rotation too, such as Jaeger Le-Coultre’s Duometre Helio Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar, Vacheron Constantin’s rather grand Berkley – with 63 complications actually the world’s most complicated watch and Piaget’s record busting Altiplano, now the world’s thinnest tourbillon watch.

Tudor Black Bay 58 in gold with a green dial.

The new Hermes cut watch debuted at Watches & Wonders.

Watches may be genderless now – the likes of singers Bad Bunny and The Weeknd wearing small and bejewelled ‘women’s watches’ has put paid to the idea that there is any real kind of division. Brands with a more masculine image such as the engineering focused IWC and the brawny Hublot both report increased female clientele.

Still, watchmakers were paying particular attention to women this year. Hermes launched an entirely new sporty chic stainless steel watch, the ‘Cut’ which comes in at a pleasing to many 36mm size. The wonder and whimsy of Chanel and Van Cleef & Arpels’ launches this year included a watch equipped with a mechanism to make butterflies flit across the dial at the latter and an animated Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel brandishing her scissors in her couture atelier in the former. Jewels that tell time were another key trend, with Vacheron Constantin, Piaget and Cartier reimagining some of its dazzling archival pieces and style codes.

Cartier is always a highlight of the fair, mining its rich archives for new ways to reimagine its recognisable shapes. This year the French jewellery house focused on its Tortue collection for its collector-favourite Prive collection and also, for the fun of it, introduced a carnelian red dial Santos-Dumont Rewind that, yes, ran backwards.

Piaget, celebrating its 150th anniversary, is having a particularly, glamorously resonant year with a renewed appreciation for its gold savoir-faire, sautoir (necklace) and cuff watches.

Jean-Bernard Forot, head of patrimony at Piaget, says there’s good reason for why the house’s golden years of designing creations for the international jet set in the 60s and 70s are finding renewed appreciation now.

“It’s true that the vintage of Piaget is very strongly linked with the seventies, and I think there is a momentum for the seventies right now. So probably it’s a question of good timing for us. Then something also we have to understand is that at Piaget women have always been important in the creativity and in the design … So even in the late sixties, seventies, the maison always offered for women a creativity that was a bit unusual for a watchmaker because Piaget was thinking about being not only a maison to measure time, but also a maison to create pleasure with time,” he says.

The Piaget Swinging Sautoir watch.

The Jaeger-LeCoultre Duometre Heliotourbillon Perpetual.

When your phone can tell the time, this seems more relevant than ever. Certainly it’s more appealing.

It’s a feeling shared by IWC chief executive Christoph Grainger Herr, who says mechanical watches – once an endangered species during the midst of the quartz crisis of the 70s and 80s, offer us something beyond making our next appointment.

“I think this idea of something meaningful and something that is really artistic and analog and mechanical …when you look at the mechanical watch. There’s something human about every heartbeat of every mechanical watch,” he says.

“I just think there’s something very relatable in this kind of mechanical [timepiece] and you see it with the resurgence of cameras and then vinyl records. I saw the other day, even in the inflation basket of the English inflation model, they reintegrated vinyl records into the basket of goods that they’re tracking.”

The moments of horological showing off is something that Julian Farren-Price, owner and managing director of Australian retailer J Farren Price clocked as one of his key trends from the fair – one he said was busier than ever.

“The brands concentrated mostly on line extensions and evolution rather than revolution. We saw new dials, colour schemes and bracelets rather than totally new model watches. Secondly there was a definite push up-market with fewer releases in steel and more in precious metal. Lastly, green is definitely the new blue. Many brands released models featuring this colour which has been a growing trend over the last few years. After all, green represents nature and growth so what better colour to use,” he says.

According to a release from Watches & Wonders Geneva Foundation, the creators of the event, the 2024 event – which this year added an additional day to its public program and extended the fair into the city of Geneva with activations and live music- increased attendance by 13 per cent on last year. The hashtag #watchesandwonders2024 had an estimated reach of 600 million by the final day. Proof that watch appreciation has extended well beyond its niche origins.