Highlights of Watches and Wonders 2024

I went to Watches and Wonders earlier this year. Watches And Wonders is now the biggest and most important global watch fair for the industry. It used to be called SIHH or the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, and there also used to be the springboard of all of this that was Baselworld. 

One of the gigantic booths at Watches and Wonders 2024

Baselworld unfortunately stopped a few years ago. SIHH was at the time primarily a Richemont Group event with some other brands invited. It became less connected to Richemont with the name change to Watches And Wonders, and is now run by the Watches And Wonders Geneva Foundation, which was created in 2022, after the first successful event that year, by Richemont, Rolex, and Patek Philippe. The foundation just announced three new members, namely Chanel, Hermès, and LVMH.

Global watch fairs, whether Baselworld or SIHH or Watches And Wonders, have always been both hugely corporate and hugely personal and often misunderstood. When a brand invites you to their booth, for example, that booth is more like a multistory building within a building that would feel at home in Geneva or any of the cantons outside it. People think it is a luxury event, which, by nature of how people act and spend it is, but it really is more of an industry and industry insider event. 

Guests admiring a watch display at Watches and Wonders 2024

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This isn’t because of any kind of bias or isolationism; it’s primarily because the discussions are of a very high level and there is very little time. And every single brand involved has to pay for every single person that sets foot in the fair in one way or another. Even if they don’t want to, if the majority chooses to invite someone, everyone shoulders part of the bill. 

The Grand Seiko booth

You may remember a few years back when they had a few Watches And Wonders events in Hong Kong, and they actually have one now in Shanghai. These are smaller scale, and meant to bring more people and more mainstream attention to a fair that is more geared to exactly that: wider dispersal of information. As such, in those fairs they had different groups where the more experienced went one way and those that were not yet as deeply immersed went another. This was appreciated by those that wanted a somewhat more basic introduction to the world of serious watches. Nowadays, the last few days of the fair are open to the public, and the brands have structured their operations as such, and they have been full every public day.

In terms of what happened at Watches And Wonders this year, and what was shown or released, which are traditionally called “novelties,” it has been what I would call a building year. Some years you have maisons (brands or companies) that release several new movements and watches and, indeed, inventions. Those tend to get a lot of attention and build for the future, but they aren’t necessarily always the volume pieces (volume is relative for these watches) that people walk into the boutique and buy. Also, these fairs have traditionally been where retailers and distributors go to look over what they will order for the coming year.

Cartier

So in a building year, what you would expect to see are pieces that would be safer, perhaps, or more crowd-pleasing. This is, in many ways, a good thing, because we see watches that more people will actually want to wear.

A great example of this is Cartier, which for many years has focused a lot of attention on their extremely high-end complications and works of craftsmanship. This year, there are pieces that are wonderful and wearable and sometimes whimsical. There is a nice new Santos de Cartier Dual Time Watch that makes an excellent but still elegant travel watch. There is also a Cartier Santos-Dumont Rewind in platinum with a deep carnelian dial. It goes backwards, and it is huge fun. 

Patek Philippe

Patek Philippe brought out some pieces that everyone will talk about: Aquanauts and Nautilus pieces in gold with blue dials. Then they have the pieces that many won’t understand or appreciate, such as the World Time watch with an extremely inventive way of synching the date indication to local time that needed several patents just to get created. Their Grand Complication is a Rare Handcrafts watch of amazing craftsmanship and mechanical wizardry, with an officer’s style case that opens in the back and is engraved in an homage to a historic pocket watch pattern, which itself was an homage to weapons engraving.

A very welcome new piece from Patek Philippe is the Golden Ellipse with a new chain-style bracelet with an ingenious new system that allows adjustment. This is important because previous such bracelets needed to be cut to size, then basically rewelded if you needed to size up. Not exactly something you wanted to tell your wife.

Detail of a Patek Philippe watch

Rolex never really makes seismic changes, and the GMT-Master II in steel with a black and grey bezel isn’t really a surprise. A lot of clickbait (or reseller-prompting) talk was of the supposed discontinuation of the red and blue bezel GMT-II, which was completely dismissed by the fact that the entire new booth interior had the bezel running through it. What was interesting was the new 1908, which is a step toward a more elegant watch than the rather over-mainstream sports watches. Excellent finish choices for that, and for those that remember, it was the more classic and elegant Rolexes that were the more collectible ones. 

Grand Seiko

Intricate detailing on the reverse side of the Grand Seiko

Tudor took a possible fair popular win with their new Black Bay 58 GMT. Their previous Black Bay GMT was a hit but also a little large on the wrist for some. The Black Bay Pro came in as a dual-time watch that wore wonderfully, and now Tudor has released the GMT function (with adjustable two-color bezel) in a 39mm steel case. Spot on, and one of the reasons why many look more to Tudor for inventiveness and creativity. I went to their new manufacture, by the way, and it helps explain how all this has come about. An amazing story for another time how proper management makes the culture, which makes history.

The Panerai booth

There was much fun at Grand Seiko, which is really taking the move to Geneva (from Basel) seriously with a whole new energy level. And they are beside Patek Philippe, which tells you a lot. What I very much enjoyed seeing and having on the wrist was a simple watch that looks to the future. Two watches actually: their Evolution 9 SLGW002 and 003.

The Evolution 9 family is the newer line, and to me it kind of moved away from the knife-edge sleekness I liked with Grand Seiko. These watches are kind of going back there with a bit of visual thinning of certain aesthetic pieces. The watch is a three-hand piece, and it has the wonderful texture of the bark (horizontal now where previously they were vertical because it was the trees not the bark) of the white birch trees that grow near the Grand Seiko Studio Shizukuishi. There is minimal text on the dial, so everything just looks elegant. The movement is a new one, and it is a manual wind. And it is pretty thin. All of which points to the fact that it can be a wonderful base for future complications. 

Tudor

If you think that sounds familiar, think of who is actually right beside them. Same formula. And because it is a manual wind watch, you really get to see the workmanship and finishing of the movement through the sapphire crystal caseback. If you look closely, when you wind the watch, you will see a moving piece that rises and clicks and looks like a little bird, which is meant to remind them of the birds they see in the forest outside where they work.

Rolex

Another Rolex

A lot of this stuff is not what you will see on websites or in press kits or in brochures. A lot of it you only find out when you talk with the designers and engineers and craftsmen.

And that is why we go to the watch fairs.