Luxury expert and founder of international advisory firm Avenue Fifty Two, Lisa Rokny reviews the Watches and Wonders 2026 edition, Geneva’s annual watchmaking event, with a distinct perspective. “To understand luxury in its truest form, one must first understand haute horology,” she says. Here, she identifies four stand-out trends and the watches that define them.
This year’s Watches and Wonders felt different. Attendance from Usher, a friend of Jaeger-LeCoultre, arrived with true brand loyalty, while Rolex’s 100th year Oyster celebration showed how legacy can be refined rather than reimagined.
In the latest edition, we also saw the rise of horology as collectible design. Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier and Hermès all demonstrated that novelties function as wearable art, a true cross-category luxury asset. The most compelling timepieces unveiled in Geneva this year reflected a broader creative shift; presentation, in particular, moved beyond display into something more immersive. Booths felt increasingly theatrical, conceived as environments rather than showcases.
There was also a notable evolution in women’s novelties. The offering at Watches and Wonders 2026 signalled a more informed, design-literate collector, with pieces conceived as complete expressions rather than adaptations. Meanwhile, technical ambition and aesthetic intent appeared more closely aligned.
With distance, the defining themes become clearer. Heritage was deployed with precision, revisiting archival codes and vintage references with greater discipline. Storytelling moved into more conceptual territory, with astrology and constellation motifs introducing narrative depth. Craft was foregrounded, with renewed emphasis on hand-made techniques and the value of human skill. At the same time, established icons were handled with restraint, evolving carefully rather than being reinterpreted.
What follows is a considered edit, a look at the 2026 watches trends featuring a selection of pieces that invite a second look:
Vintage Revival
The Ludo Secret revisits a Van Cleef & Arpels design that dates back to 1934, when the Ludo bracelet first appeared. Its belt-inspired form became a signature of the maison’s taste for trompe l’oeil, resonating with the language of couture from the outset. This interpretation draws on a 1949 model, its bracelet composed of mirror-polished yellow gold briquette links, assembled and adjusted by hand. Sapphires are arranged in generous crescent motifs around the buckle, their velvety blue selected for consistency of colour and precision of cut, and set in a graduated scale that amplifies their radiance. Press both sides of the clasp and a guilloché mother-of-pearl dial is revealed, with a baguette-cut sapphire marking 12 o’clock – time concealed within jewellery, as it was from the beginning.
The Coco Game Long Necklace turns Gabrielle Chanel into a pixelated video game avatar rendered in black and white, blending pop culture iconography with the maison’s couture codes in a format that is as playful in concept as it is in execution. The graphic aesthetic is built through traditional craftsmanship: 242 diamonds in total set across 18K white gold and titanium with black PVD coating, the pixel design itself the result of four months’ development, achieving something that looks deliberately digital and is anything but. Worn as a pendant necklace – driven by a quartz movement – and limited to five pieces, it sits firmly in the territory of collectible high jewellery.
The Myst de Cartier pulls from the early 1930s, under the direction of Jeanne Toussaint, whose taste for the flamboyant and the volumetric shaped the house’s penchant for the colour black. Here, black lacquer is applied by hand, building a bead-like Art Deco structure that plays curves against geometry and pavé against opacity. There is no clasp. The bracelet’s elasticity allows it to slip onto the wrist, producing a trompe-l’oeil effect in which the piece appears to shift and almost disappear as light moves across it. At around 30 hours to set, the emphasis is as much on visual impact as it is on timekeeping, with the construction itself carrying the weight of the piece.
Bvlgari harmoniously merges high jewellery and horology into a single, cohesive art form, and the Serpenti Tubogas Studs Capsule pushes that idea further. The collection revives the maison’s defining gold and steel aesthetic, a material pairing that became a signature in the 1970s, setting the nobility of gold against the industrial confidence of steel, which remains as visually charged today as it was then. The focal point of this new chapter is the stud, a pyramidal form drawn directly from Bvlgari’s jewellery archives and reapplied to the supple Tubogas coils, its geometric facets punctuating the bracelet’s curves and transforming it into something that reads as sculpture as much as timepiece. Four limited editions carry the idea, with carnelian, mother-of-pearl, sodalite and malachite dials underscoring Bvlgari’s strength as a colourist.
The Golden Ellipse returns in its medium size. At 31.1mm by 35.6mm, the case reasserts the elliptical geometry that made the collection an instant counterpoint to the watches of its era, with its era-defining curvature that has withstood the test of time. The olive green sunburst dial earns its place through what the eye can see: reflections that move, a depth that flat dials do not have, with baton hour markers and cheveux-type hands in white gold, and a shiny olive green calfskin strap with cream stitching tying the palette together. Beneath it all, the ultra-thin Calibre 240 with 22K gold mini-rotor keeps the case to just 5.99 mm, making the 3738/100G among the most slender models in Patek Philippe’s current collection.
Astrology and Constellations
The maison’s 1906 sales records mention a crescent moon set with a sapphire and brilliants. In 1907, a star brooch followed, in pearls and diamonds. A pocket watch from 1929 displayed the moon’s different phases, and the 1950s brought the first Zodiac medallions and the Meteor wristwatch. In watchmaking, this long fascination finds its fullest expression in the Poetic Astronomy theme, where mechanisms, precious materials and craftsmanship combine to give each dial a sense of depth and fantasy that text struggles to fully convey. The Lady Arpels Jour Nuit, in white or yellow gold with diamonds, yellow sapphires and aventurine glass, carries a self-winding movement with a 24-hour mechanism. The Lady Arpels Planétarium, in white or rose gold with diamonds, aventurine glass and pink mother-of-pearl, runs on a self-winding movement with a planetarium mechanism. These dials shrink the infinitely large to fit on the wrist.
The Slim d’Hermès Squelette Lune tracks both hemispheres simultaneously, its double moonphase giving the piece its celestial quality, while the skeletonised H1953 micro-rotor movement keeps it thin, leaning into lightness and negative space over density or display. The architecture is deliberately restrained, allowing the complication to sit within an open framework rather than dominate it, the movement’s geometry contributing as much to the visual balance as the indication itself. The 39.5 mm case, available in titanium or platinum with leather straps, is disciplined and clean, reinforcing the sense of quiet precision that defines the watch, and the clarity of its overall composition.
The Overseas has always carried its sense of purpose lightly, and the Cardinal Points edition makes that spirit explicit. Four dials, each representing a cardinal point – north, east, south, and west – transform the classic dual time display into something closer to a navigation instrument, an idea rooted in the exploration philosophy of Cory Richards, whose ethos of movement and discovery runs through the watch as an inspiration rather than a blueprint. The choice of full titanium for both case and bracelet, worn here alongside an additional strap, is deliberate, shifting the Overseas away from precious metal statement territory toward the kind of muted, technical credibility that serious travellers and serious collectors tend to find more persuasive. Lightweight, durable, and finished with the restraint that titanium demands, it wears its haute horology credentials without advertising them. Inside, the in-house Calibre 5110 DT/3, certified with the Geneva Hallmark, integrates dual time, day and night indication, and date within a movement finished to the standard Vacheron Constantin’s reputation requires.
Handmade Craft
The Slim d’Hermès Pocket Roaaaaar! begins with Alice Shirley’s lion, a motif first born on Hermès silk and here translated into something altogether more demanding. Wood marquetry using ten rare species is assembled across a multitude of tiny fragments and worked alongside Grand Feu enamel, fired at 800 degrees Celsius, a process of patience and intensity that achieves the depth, texture, and richness of colour the finished object carries. The white gold pocket watch format and edition of three per colour place it at the furthest edge of connoisseur territory: intimate, rare, and deliberately impractical. Timekeeping is present, but it is not what this object is about.
The Master Hybris Mechanica Calibre 362 makes an argument that has rarely been made so convincingly: that grand complication and extreme thinness are not opposing ambitions but, in the right hands, form a whole. The movement measures just 5 mm, while the watch itself comes in at 8.25 mm. The minute repeater and flying tourbillon are not assembled on top of a base movement but conceived as intrinsic parts of a single integrated architecture, each element – striking mechanism, tourbillon cage, peripheral winding rotor – designed from the outset as a contributor to thinness rather than an addition. The result, Master Hybris Mechanica Ultra Thin Minute Repeater, remains the world’s thinnest automatic minute repeater tourbillon. What makes the watch extraordinary beyond its mechanics is the decision to make all of it visible. Three bridges in transparent sapphire crystal, an openworked dial reduced to a ring of white gold, and a peripheral rotor that encircles rather than obscures the calibre together expose all 593 components in motion.
Yves Piaget once said that a watch is first and foremost a piece of jewellery, and the Swinging Pebbles collection makes that conviction tangible. Each pendant is carved from a single slice of ornamental stone (tiger’s eye, verdite or pietersite), hollowed with sufficient precision to enclose a Manufacture movement before being closed into a form so smooth and organic it reads as much a found object as a timepiece. Suspended from a sinuous, twisted gold chain that moves with its wearer, it dissolves the boundary between instrument and adornment in a way that feels natural to a maison that has always treated the two as inseparable. The reference points are specific and intentional. The Swinging Pebbles draw a direct line back to Piaget’s 21st Century Collection of 1969 and the malachite-sculpted Kimono pocket watches of 1974, when pebble-shaped forms gave expression to the maison’s organic design language.
The Chanel Chessboard places Gabrielle Chanel at the centre of her own mythology, elevating her to queen status within a fully constructed symbolic universe. Every piece on the board encodes the house: lion, Vendôme column, couture bust. Across the 32 pieces, the universe of the maison is rendered in gold, ceramic and diamonds, each element executed as a miniature sculpture. Only the two queens conceal time beneath their forms, transforming them into wearable objects. A one-of-a-kind piece in which the watch is the last thing you notice, and entirely the point.
Since 2018, Jaeger-LeCoultre has been transposing Hokusai’s work onto the caseback of the Reverso – beginning with the Great Wave, and from 2021 moving into the eight-piece Waterfalls series, one or two prints at a time. These four final editions bring that project to its conclusion. What began as an act of artistic homage has become something rarer: a sustained dialogue across nearly a decade between the disciplines of fine watchmaking and the ukiyo-e tradition, carried to completion with the same patience the prints themselves demand. The craft involved is almost confrontational in its intensity. Each caseback miniature is built from a minimum of 14 layers of grand feu enamel, fired individually at around 800°C, with the enameller reproducing Hokusai’s bokashi shading technique and rendering the original Japanese cartouche captions at a microscopic scale, yet perfectly legible, all within a space of 2 cm². The front dials add a further layer of complexity, with hand-guilloché patterns in barleycorn, wavy, bamboo and herringbone requiring up to 360 passes of the rose-engine lathe before translucent coloured enamel is applied. By completing this series, Jaeger-LeCoultre honours not just the Waterfalls prints, but the spirit of an artist who spent his life pushing the boundaries of what his craft could express.
The établissage system that gave birth to Audemars Piguet in the Vallée de Joux was built on a simple but powerful idea: that exceptional things are made when skilled individuals each bring their deepest expertise to a shared purpose, coordinated toward a finished whole. The Atelier des Établisseurs revives that model in its most literal form, reuniting watchmakers, jewellers, engravers, enamellers, lapidaries and designers within the Musée Atelier in Le Brassus to produce watches in intentionally small numbers, each one shaped by the full weight of the disciplines involved. The three debut creations are as different from one another as the traditions they draw upon. The Établisseurs Galets takes its form from the polished river stones of the Lac de Joux, its pebble-shaped case and fluid bracelet links moving with the ease of water-worn rocks. The Établisseurs Nomade functions as a pocket watch, wristwatch and desk clock, its hand-skeletonised movement using bridges as hour markers. The Établisseurs Peacock is a secret watch whose engraved white gold case opens to reveal a miniature peacock, its tail forming the dial, its eyes set with coloured gemstones.
Evolution of Icons
Some watches announce themselves quietly. The Spirit of Big Bang Impact is not one of them. Born in 2016 with the Big Bang Impact, the fragmented motif has spent a decade evolving, and in 2026, it arrives somewhere new. For the first time in Hublot’s history, diamonds are set directly into sapphire. Not onto it, not around it. Into it. Each stone sits in a laser-machined mount, and completing a single case takes hundreds of hours of machining, polishing and setting. The HUB1770 skeletonised automatic calibre, with a 50-hour power reserve and moonphase display, runs through all three editions: All Black ceramic limited to 100 pieces, sapphire and osmium in 30, and the diamond-set sapphire jewellery version in 20, with 145 cut diamonds taking the Impact motif from dial to bezel.
The Prussian Blue of the L.U.C XPS dial has a story behind it. The pigment was discovered by a Berlin colour merchant, far from Switzerland, though its precise character feels entirely at home at the Manufacture in Fleurier, where Chopard has been based since 1996. At 7.20 mm in total case thickness, the watch achieves its slender profile through the 3.30 mm L.U.C 96.12-L calibre, whose Chopard Twin Technology stacks two superimposed barrels working in parallel to deliver a 65-hour power reserve without adding unnecessary height. COSC chronometer certification, a stop-seconds mechanism, and small seconds at 6 o’clock complete a specification that speaks directly to those for whom elegance is found in technical rigour rather than visual flourish.
Over a century after its original debut, the Historiques American 1921 remains one of the most distinctive watches in existence. Its 45-degree tilted dial and offbeat crown placement emerged from the experimental spirit of the 1920s, when easier readability while driving was among the considerations that shaped it, yet they have aged into something far more lasting: a radical piece of design that still reads as avant-garde without ever trying to. The latest iteration sharpens the aesthetic rather than reimagining it, with a new grained silver dial and blue accents bringing a cooler freshness to the silhouette while leaving its essential character intact. Inside, the manual-winding Calibre 4400 AS carries the Geneva Hallmark and a 65-hour power reserve, a reminder that Vacheron Constantin’s interest lies firmly in the refinement of traditional watchmaking rather than the theatre of complication.
The Octo Finissimo at 37 mm is not a smaller version of an existing watch but a new proposition built from the ground up. The self-winding Calibre BVF 100 with micro-rotor, measuring just 2.35 mm in height, was developed over three years specifically for this diameter, drawing on advances originally pioneered for Bvlgari’s Serpenti ladies’ watches. Despite being fractionally thicker than the movement in the 40 mm version, it achieves a 20% reduction in volume. At 65 grams and 37 mm, the watch is positioned as an exercise in what the Italians call sprezzatura: that quality of effortless elegance that looks unconsidered precisely because so much consideration has gone into it. It slips beneath a shirt cuff as naturally as it commands attention, and the four versions – sandblasted titanium, satin-polished titanium, 18-carat yellow gold, and a Minute Repeater in acoustic titanium – each make the same argument in a different register. Radiating Côtes de Genève on the movement bridges, a new profile for the octagonal screws, a push-button bracelet clasp, and a screw-fastening case-to-bracelet junction signal a watch reconsidered in its entirety. The geometric case still speaks the language of Roman columns and domes, remaining unmistakably Octo, but leaner and more considered.
The Jubilee motif has been part of Rolex’s visual vocabulary since the late 1970s, but the new Oyster Perpetual 36 reimagines it in a way that feels contemporary. The letters of the Rolex name are rendered across no fewer than ten distinct colours in a multicoloured lacquer composition that is at once graphic, joyful, and technically exacting, each colour applied individually and in sequence with exceptional precision. Every letter and shape within the pattern must align perfectly, making this among the most demanding dials Rolex has produced within the Oyster Perpetual family, and a reminder that dial-making at this level is as much a discipline as movement engineering. The choice of the Oyster Perpetual as the canvas for this expression is itself significant. It is Rolex’s most distilled and accessible reference, built around Oystersteel, the Oyster bracelet and Calibre 3230 with Superlative Chronometer certification, a formula of such quiet confidence that it needs nothing added to justify itself.
