Geneva in late summer is always a theatre of contradictions. This year’s Watch Days unfolded between scaffolding and lake light, rain-drenched lobbies and sudden bursts of brilliance. The independents once again claimed the stage, reminding us that contemporary watchmaking thrives not on certainty but on paradox: wearability laced with theatre, heritage entangled with reinvention, spectacle pressed into the service of survival.
It is this tension we explore in the new issue of the WatchDossier Journal (Issue 12). Our reportage from Geneva sets the scene: Urwerk dazzling with kinetic ritual, Czapek attaching a robot to a rattrapante, Louis Erard weaving gold with semiconductor machines, Tutima revealing unexpected elegance in titanium. The salons buzzed with questions—does novelty risk taming eccentricity, or is it the only path to relevance?
To deepen these questions, we turn to six new watches, each examined in full. Tutima’s Patria in Titanium seduces by turning German pragmatism into sensual ritual. Trilobe’s Trente-Deux rewrites independence as silence and restraint. L.Leroy’s Bal du Temps excavates history to ask whether we still know how to listen to time itself. Czapek’s R.U.R. turns excess into satire and satire into craft. Akhor’s debut, Le Temps en Équilibre, offers levitation as its first act of identity. Urwerk’s UR-150 Blue Scorpion stages time as an initiation ritual, stinging with theatre and exclusivity. Each piece is a lens on collector psychology, where desire often outweighs use, and where the absurdity of devotion is also its poetry.
Together, these essays form a map of the present moment: an industry where scarcity is strategy, spectacle is necessity, and independence is performed as both survival and declaration. The Journal does not pretend to resolve these paradoxes. Instead, it lingers in them, because this is where watchmaking lives—in the distance between craft and theatre, precision and myth, utility and fantasy.
We invite you, then, to read the reportage, dive into the analyses, and join us in this season of paradox.
— The Editor
The Lake Belongs to the Independents: Geneva Watch Days 2025 and the Shape of Horology’s Future
Five days of showcasing, of presentations from independents and the occasional larger name, yet Geneva Watch Days remains the mecca for independent horological expression. Most of the show unfolded a…
When Time Stings and Seduces
Every community has its initiations, and in watch collecting, one of them is learning to read time differently. The UR-150 Blue Scorpion does not merely display hours and minutes; it reenacts them in…
Patria in Titanium: Seduction of Strength
A paradox beats beneath the polished titanium case: Tutima, famed for pragmatic pilot’s chronographs, now courts collectors with a delicately finished, hand-wound dress watch. This is a brand whose w…
Time Unwound: Trilobe’s Trente-Deux Appears
The contradiction sits at the heart of Trilobe’s new Trente-Deux: a watch that insists upon independence by whispering through restraint. It emerges from Paris, a city more associated with couture an…
The Archaeology of Time: L.Leroy's Bal du Temps
In Geneva's Hotel Beau Rivage, amid familiar watch presentation choreography, L.Leroy unveils its first production series of the modern era: the Osmior Bal du Temps. Yet this is not merely another re…
Robots, Rattrapantes, and Other Necessary Excesses
The contradiction could not be clearer: a Geneva maison resurrected in 2015, now grafting a titanium robot head onto a haute horlogerie rattrapante, all in the name of “beauty.” One imagines François…
Akhor Balances Time in Mid-Air
Every debut from a new watch brand begins with a contradiction. Akhor is no exception. On one hand, it arrives in Geneva claiming gravitas—its own manufacture movement, a patented architecture, a sus…
The next issue will be published on October 4, 2025.