The watch world is changing. Borders between types, styles, positioning, and identities are becoming blurred and porous. Here, a fashion brand “moves upmarket.” There, an elite designer makes a “world watch,” or somewhere else, a respectable master watchmaker works on “futuristic” timepieces, while everywhere, brands, brand names, labels, and creations are sprouting up like mushrooms.
Never has watchmaking, in its more than 500-year history, known such a wealth of variety as we are
witnessing today. This diversity is seen in both technical invention and style and design. And, never, ever, has it seen a period so mixed up and confused.
Everything seems possible. While major trends are taking hold of society, there are just as many counter-trends that open new niches, giving birth to other trends and fashions that no one, or nearly no one, could have anticipated.
Yet, the brands imagine themselves as eternal, beacons of light in all the confusion. Perhaps, in the end, they delude themselves about their power? Or, perhaps they exaggerate their own importance?
At a time when the hardest rappers are showing off enormous mechanical complications whose brand is concealed under the shimmering of diamonds (who could have predicted it?), at a time when huge, nearly untouched markets are opening to the “watch culture,” the landmarks and beacons are beginning to shift and change positions.
We have already said, over and over again, that the fashion universe has “contaminated”(also we could say “transformed”, “influenced”) watchmaking, from top to bottom. Moreover, the lessons of the designers, confined until the middle of the 1990s to fairly tight circles, are now everywhere, even to the extent, we could say, that they have been pillaged by the “globalized” brands. A luxury couturier launches a very inexpensive Made in China watch brand? A micro-entity, on the contrary, having understood and absorbed the lessons from the fashion universe as well as those from the realm of haute horlogerie, launches extremely high-level products in the fashion range? A leading traditional watchmaker tries to re-conquer market share by fashionizing its collections?
No need for more examples. Today, there is total confusion of types, tastes and positioning that reigns everywhere. Yet, some confusions are fortunate and can be seen as a sign of life. It bears witness to the historically high level of dynamism and creativity in the current state of watchmaking affairs. Europa Star explores some of these “transformations” in this Special Design/Fashion section.

Photo: SUNSHINE by the new Swiss brand Reynaud Genève.
18 carat white gold watch set with diamonds and pink sapphires (2.46 carats). Moiré strap in various colours.


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