The velvet ropes are coiled. The espresso machines are cold. The booth walls, torn down and crated. The prestigious international watch exhibition and trade show, Watches and Wonders 2025, concluded with its usual symphony of applause, embargo lifts, and exhausted enthusiasm—last Monday, April 7. And as we scroll through the endless flood of wrist shots, press kits, and post-event think pieces, one question remains:
Was there actually anything new?
The answer, whispered between champagne flutes and recycled press copy, is: not really.
Geneva this year offered its familiar theater—grand, polished, and predictably reverent. But beneath the scale and spectacle, the fair played like a greatest hits album on repeat. New references came dressed in familiar silhouettes. Bold "concepts" were simply old watches wearing new dials. We were told it was the future, but it looked a lot like 1972 in better lighting.
Skeleton Dials, Hollow Intent
Skeleton dials were everywhere, as if transparency could mask creative fatigue. These openworked pieces revealed the movement, sure—but often sacrificed legibility. A spiral bridge here, a peek at the mainspring there—mere glimpses that hinted at complexity without revealing intent. It was less about showing inner workings, more about filling the feed. The irony wasn’t lost: watches baring it all, yet saying nothing.
Innovation™ Presented by Marketing
Of course, the word innovation was tossed around like confetti. AI, sustainability, modularity—they all made cameo appearances in carefully worded presentations. But most of it felt like marketing-first, product-second. As if a PowerPoint could disguise a lack of purpose.
Buzzwords floated above the booths like helium balloons—festive but untethered.
The Booth Arms Race
Speaking of booths—those got bigger. Some brands now occupy enough square footage to house a small embassy. Towering installations. Mood lighting. Curated playlists.
One parked a Formula One car at its center, like a trophy of relevance; another displayed the gleaming forward fuselage of an airplane, as if horology had somehow merged with aviation cosplay. The theatrics were undeniable.
But for all the architectural drama and thematic ambition, what was inside often felt... timid. A beige dial here. A titanium case there. Evolution, at best. A new font on the reissue of a reissue.
Still, a few releases offered flickers of originality. At Chronoswiss, the new Small Seconds Blue Orbit brought something quietly delightful: a touch of whimsy and color in a sea of gravity. Smaller in size and intentionally departing from the characteristic dimensions of a Chronoswiss timepiece, it is a flirtatious wink at the unisex market. Playful but not unserious, its orbiting small seconds display gave the eye something to follow—even as the mind wandered through the complications of the neighboring booths.
Color Theory, or Lack Thereof
What stood out most this year wasn’t restraint—it was color. Dials in turquoise, pistachio, lavender, coral. Saturated hues, pastel gradients, sunburst fuchsias.
At times, walking the aisles felt less like exploring fine watchmaking and more like flipping through a Lacoste polo catalog.
The effort to inject joy into the product was obvious. And yet the question lingered: what is all this color trying to say?
Is it optimism? A bid for youth? A way to signal boldness without altering the form underneath? Or is it simply camouflage—a distraction from the fact that many of these designs are structurally indistinct, dressed up in seasonal shades to feel fresh?
That said, some maisons played with hue and restraint more artfully. Parmigiani Fleurier’s Tonda PF Sport Chronograph Ultra Cermet Milano Blue was beautifully made and beautifully named—a phrase that sounds like a wine and wears like a whisper. The case was satin-brushed perfection; the dial hue just restrained enough to suggest seriousness beneath the sportiness.
Whatever the answer, this year proved one thing: color is having a moment. Whether or not it has meaning… remains to be seen.
Regressing Beautifully
And still, somehow, the fair moved in reverse. Not just with the aesthetic throwbacks or the endless tributes to long-dead models, but with the way the industry framed progress. Retrograde hands swept across dials as if to say, "Let’s go backward—elegantly."
And when actual innovation did arrive, it came swaddled in storytelling so heavy-handed it nearly obscured the point. “Here is a revolutionary new movement,” we were told, “inspired by our founder’s original pocket watch, now rendered in 18-karat gold, with a quote from a 19th-century poet etched on the caseback.”
This is horology at its most performative—when everything is limited, numbered, and narrativized into oblivion. When substance gets smothered by heritage, and true craft is drowned in concept.
Even IWC, known for its industrial stoicism, managed to surprise. The Ingenieur Perpetual Calendar 42 is a feat of mechanical packaging, while the Automatic 35 Stainless Steel is a callback to earlier, purer designs. This one stood defiant and elegant on the wrist.
It’s almost subversive now to make a 35mm watch, and the effect is disarming—like finding a paperback in a world of coffee-table tomes.
And then there was Jaeger-LeCoultre, ever the cerebral showman, unveiling the Reverso Tribute Geography. It is complicated but restrained—evocative of travel in the abstract, not the age of gate numbers and compression socks. The watch folds in on itself, as all Reversos do, inviting contemplation. Or at the very least, another angle for photography.
The Rolex Paradox
In a paradox that felt too ironic to mention aloud, it was Rolex that offered at the same time the most democratic and innovative face of the fair.
The new Rolex Land-Dweller features the revolutionary Dynapulse sequential distribution escapement, made from silicon, beating at a frequency of 5 Hz, and backed by seven patent applications.
In terms of quality-to-price ratio—mechanical quality and reliability, design, and brand equity—few can rival most of the stainless steel Rolex collections. But good luck finding one. Scarcity, after all, is part of the charm. Or perhaps the cruelty.
The Face of Time
And then, of course, there were the ambassadors.
The new faces of horology, flown in with immaculate grooming and vague reverence for mechanical timekeeping. Some stood in front of watches they may or may not wear, whispering words like “precision” and “excellence” into cameras while surrounded by handlers.
Some of them were instantly recognizable. Others prompted a confused glance and a whispered, 'Who’s that?' to a neighboring journalist.
The industry, ever aspirational, has outsourced its identity—placing its most complex objects in the hands of people selected precisely for their simplicity.
A spectacle within a spectacle.
The Real Wonder
And yet—yet—there were moments.
A prototype from a lesser-known atelier. A quiet independent with a radical design and no marketing department. A finishing touch so unnecessary and so perfect it almost brought you to a halt. A rare deadbeat seconds complication that you found yourself reaching instinctively for the loupe, lingering longer in intimate admiration.
You could miss them easily. They weren’t on TikTok. They weren’t featured in the opening keynote. But they were there, tucked into corners and passed along in whispers.
Because even in a year where much of the fair felt like it was running on muscle memory, the soul of watchmaking hasn’t vanished.
It’s just harder to find—drowned in dazzle, buried in hashtags, and yes, briefly obscured by the flashbulbs of a press line.
By the end of the fourth day, my notebook was full, my wrist sore from trying on pieces I could not afford, and my mind dazed by the paradoxes of taste and wealth. Watches and Wonders had delivered wonder, certainly. But the watches? Many of them were exactly as expected.
And that, in the end, is the real wonder.
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