A Few Things I Didn’t Hate from Watches and Wonders 2023

This year’s Watches and Wonders Geneva was the biggest version of the show so far — there were over 40 brands at the Palexpo convention center and attendance was so heavy that the wait to get into the show on opening day taxed the ability of the staff to keep up. According to the organizers, around 43,000 guests attended the show — a fraction of the 150,000 or so who showed up for Baselworld at the show’s peak but still more than enough to fill the halls of the Palexpo to capacity.

Despite the volume, though, it felt like something of an incremental year. The number of new watches shown by each brand varied enormously from one to the next, as you might expect. Patek Philippe and Rolex, for instance, each showed a reasonably wide range of timepieces — but there was not a whole lot that broke new ground horologically or from a design standpoint. Still, the watches that were talked about were talked about a lot, and there were design decisions and product launches that attracted their fair share of controversy. In fact, there were a few pieces that were downright divisive — but which I think have their own idiosyncratic appeal. These are mostly watches I’ve touched on before but the love/hate reactions they evoked were, I thought, worth unpacking a little more.

The Rolex Day-Date “Emoji.”

I would not have expected Rolex, of all brands, to be the one that reminded us most that you must always be ready to expect the unexpected, but here we are. The Day-Date Emoji watch was, as everyone knows, not exactly your (grand)father’s Day-Date. Also known as the Jigsaw Day-Date (no connection with the horror movie heavy of the same name), this totally out-of-left-field take on the Day-Date — probably the most traditionally luxurious and luxury-oriented of all Rolex watches, featured a day window which showed uplifting text instead of the day, and a date window that showed uplifting emoji instead of — well, instead of the date.

There are so many ways Rolex could have gone with an unexpected update to the Day-Date — an annual calendar DD, for instance, would have been unexpected, interesting and made good use of a complication already in the lineup (in the Sky-Dweller; the fact that the Sky-Dweller has an annual calendar is something a lot of us tend to forget) but instead we got a Day-Date that, quite literally, subverts not only the functionality of a Day-Date but also the vibe of the Day-Date at its most fundamental. If Rolex had said with a straight face that the watch had been designed by Jeff Koons, it would have been kind of plausible.

And this, of course, is just what’s so cool about it. It is witty, funny, colorful and the biggest breath of fresh air from Rolex in a long, long time (it also totally eclipsed the launch of the new 1908 dress watch line, but them’s the breaks, 1908; I’m sure you’ll have your time to shine). There is definitely a school of thought that believes that the DD should not have been messed with to this extent but the fact that it undermines everything we all thought the Day-Date, and Rolex, stand for is the whole point of the watch. Besides, it’s not as if Rolex has never done anything bizarrely outlandish that almost parodies the basic identity of a given model before. Leopard Daytona, I’m looking at you.

The Crown Guards On The New IWC Ingenieur 40MM.

The relaunch of the IWC Ingenieur in a 40mm case was a clear reboot of the original Gérald Genta design from 1976 with one major exception — the new version has crown guards, which the original did not. This allowed those of us who believe that a reboot of a classic design should be more or less an exact copy-paste (which might include me, depending on the day) the opportunity to drink a very specific flavor of haterade and, indeed, crown guards, like the date window, and especially like the 4:00 date window, seems to be one of those design features about which vehement disagreement can occur out of all proportion to the magnitude of the feature itself.

Personally, I think that what it really boils down to is that crown guards protect the crown and, if Genta’s original design had a flaw (or omission, maybe) from an engineering perspective, it was actually the absence of crown guards which, it bears repeating, protect the crown, and serve an undeniable functional purpose in a sports watch. The Ingenieur SL was, after all, not designed as a luxury sports watch per se, but as a technical watch with an engineering narrative, and Genta was obviously not opposed to the idea of crown guards completely, as they were part of the basic design of the original Nautilus.

The crown is simply the most easily damaged part of a watch and, without crown guards, is very susceptible to the effects of a good whack. Putting crown guards on a sports watch is simply a way of buying some extra insurance against damage in general and water intrusion in particular. Rolex, the pragmatist’s pragmatist of watch brands, has been using them on the Sub since the launch of the 5512 in 1959 and it’s hard to dispute the fact that from a practical standpoint there is a good argument for including them.

Bonus round: the soft iron inner case. I’ll be brief. Yes, I know that it is an antiquated solution at this point in the history of materials science and I don’t care. Having a movement susceptible to magnetism but which is protected by a soft iron case and dial is a time-honored and very effective solution to the problem and, moreover, it is simply more historically interesting than going at the issue purely from a materials science perspective.

The Entire Chanel “Interstellar” Capsule Collection, Including And Especially The J12s.

I put up a picture of the J12 “Cybernetic” from the Interstellar capsule collection that Chanel launched this year on my personal Instagram and jeez, you’d think I’d suggested that the Earth orbits the Sun to the Inquisition in 1633, at least based on some of the reactions. Self-styled watch enthusiasts love to drag the J12 and I’m not sure why — it has as much claim to classic design status as any watch in the modern pantheon of horology. It’s an instantly recognizable design as well; it was one of the great pioneering watch designs to be made in ceramic; and it’s not as if Chanel shows no signs of being interested in horology for its own sake — the company owns a stake in Kenissi (who makes movements for Tudor, among others) as well as having a minority stake in F. P. Journe, which is pretty legit for a “fashion brand.” The J12 Cybernetic is one of the cleverest uses of ceramic as a design material that I have seen in 30 years of covering watches. The left-hand side of the case is a more or less conventional round shape, but, on the right, the circular black case transforms into a grid of black and white pixels, two of which function as crown guards, people.

Is it a stretch for a lot of more conservative enthusiasts to look at such a thing with an open mind? Sure it is. It is also in its own way at least as intelligently witty, subversive and even humorous as that Emoji/Jigsaw Day-Date — as sophisticated a statement on the fragmentation of classical views of the universe by modern information technology as I have ever seen (that’s how I’m reading it, anyway). Lest we forget, by the way, Chanel was also one of the few brands this year, along with Van Cleef, to show an interesting clock, designed in collaboration with L’Epée.

The Fact That It Was Kind Of An Incremental Year

I’ve been covering watch trade shows for longer than I care to remember and while I’ve seen the industry go through some ups and downs, this is one of the quieter years I can remember. Was there anything really new at the show? Sure, we got some surprises but what we also got overwhelmingly was careful updates to existing models. Maybe this has something to do with how much the identity of the show has changed. I mean, the immediate predecessor to Watches And Wonders, the SIHH, was intended from the start to be very much a pure luxury play — it was Richemont and Friends (the latter at one point including both Richard Mille and Audemars Piguet, among others — Dunhill used to show a watch collection at SIHH, believe it or not, and I bet you didn’t know that Baume & Mercier showed this year — widely reported, it was not).

But this year it was a mixed bag to say the least. Sure, we had Rolex and Patek, and relative newcomer Grand Seiko, which seems to fit the vibe of a luxury watch show to a T, despite the fact that this is only the second year GS has participated. But there were some other brands which even until fairly recently would have been odd fits to say the least, the most noticeable of which (to me anyway) was U-Boat, whose stock in trade is left-hand drive, oversized canteen style watches priced at less than what a lot of other brands at the show would charge for a replacement strap and buckle. And in sharp contrast to some preceding years in which you could count on seeing a solid handful of new watches from Glashütte, this year A. Lange & Söhne came with one, count ’em (it) one new watch, which was a chronograph version of the Odysseus — nice, sure, but not exactly unexpected; I feel like we’ve been waiting for those pushers to be used as start/stop/reset buttons since the watch launched in 2019.

Now you could say that the overall incremental feel of the show, plus the addition of some brands which are not exactly what you’d expect to see at Son of SIHH, represents timidity on the part of the industry in general and a watering-down of the show in particular, but I don’t know if I see it that way. The show seems on its way, honestly, to being more inclusive (except for the non-participation of most of the better known independent brands, for whom a booth at a Geneva watch show has historically either represented an unwise expenditure of scarce capital, or a relegation to a small and not very prepossessing space off to the side of the main event). In fact, it kind of feels more like Baselworld, of all things, than I ever would have thought possible.

The big problem is that Baselworld, for all its flaws, at least took place in a sprawling, walkable-from-hotels group of spaces in the middle of town and the Palexpo is inconveniently out by the airport, which means being trapped in an airless, sunless trade show hall for as long as you are there. If WWG gets any bigger, logistics for visitors are going to become even more sketchy than they already were this year. But for now, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to a single, industry-wide celebration of watchmaking.