The Hazemann & Monnin ‘School Watch’ Is The 2026 Winner Of The Louis Vuitton Watch Prize For Independent Creatives
The School Watch was the victor in what Jury President Carole-Forestier Kasapi described as a very closely contested race to the finish.
The Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives is held every two years, and the goal is relatively straightforward: identify a promising watchmaker with an original viewpoint and a proven capacity to realize an original vision, and provide them with the technical, strategic, and financial support necessary to take their efforts to a new level of development. As the brief is fairly general, albeit with some specific constraints (the rules are available here) the pool of potential applicants is quite large, and in the first iteration attracted over a thousand initial applicants. The individuals tasked with selecting the finalists are the Committee of Experts (I’ve been on the Committee for both years of the Prize) who evaluate 20 semi-finalists, from whom the top 5 are chosen as finalist based on a specific set of numerically weighted criteria.
The Committee also chooses five jury members from among its ranks of 65 individuals, and those five jury members have the very difficult task of picking a winner. As you can imagine, given the fairly elastic selection criteria, you can end up with a very heterogenous group of entrants, semi-finalists, and finalists, and this year the five finalists were very different from each other in just about every respect you can imagine.
Xinyan Dai (Fam Al Hut, China), Alexandre Hazemann and Victor Monnin (Hazemann & Monnin, Switzerland), Bernhard Lederer (Lederer, Switzerland), Daizoh Makihara (Daizoh Makihara Watchcraft Japan) and Norifumi Seki (Quiet Club, Japan). The Fading Hours watch is a unique take on the alarm complication; the Lederer Racing Green is a precision enthusiast’s take on the Breguet natural escapement; the Möbius is an unusual multi-axis tourbillon with double retrograde display; Beauties of Nature is a very high craft métiers d’art piece with automata; and the Hazemann & Monnin School watch, while unusual in layout, is perhaps the most traditional of the entrants, featuring an hour striker en passant, and instantaneous jumping hour, with mother of pearl and malachite subdials.
The winner was the School Watch, but as Carole Forestier-Kasapi noted in her presentation speech, it was not exactly a shoe-in. Forestier-Kasapi is one of the most formidable technical experts in the industry; her career began when she won the Breguet Prize (awarded to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Breguet’s birth) as a recent technical college graduate, for a central carousel tourbillon which would go on after further development, to become the Ulysse Nardin Freak. Since then her career has included responsibility for the designs for the movements for the Cartier Fine Watchmaking Collection, and she is currently TAG Heuer’s technical director. (I remember asking her in 2008 if tourbillons were difficult to design, and she looked at me as if I were a particularly dim bulb and said, “A tourbillon? Any idiot can design a tourbillon. Chronographs are hard.”)
Forestier-Kasapi noted that the process of choosing this year’s winner was especially arduous, and since the jury does not conduct its final deliberations until the day of the awards event, they were under some time pressure as well. Finding themselves deadlocked, she said that they finally began to make progress when they asked themselves if there was one watch among the finalists which they could all agree was not a first prize candidate, and there was. With the field narrowed to four watches, successive rounds of elimination finally led to two watches remaining, with the winner being chosen by a 2 to 3 vote; the race could not have been closer.
The winning watch is called a School Watch as the co-founders of the brand met while attending the watchmaking school in Morteau, France. At the ceremony, during which the trophy was ceremonially passed on by 2024 winner Raul Pagès, the winners said:
“Winning the second edition of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize represents a profound recognition of what our atelier is — and what we want it to become. From the conception of movements to the decoration of every component, this honor affirms an approach we believe in. It also gives us the means to go further: to strengthenan independent house and transmit new ideas about watchmaking to those who will carry it forward after us.”
The prize, as was the case for the first edition, provides a grant of €150,000, and a one year personalized mentorship program at La Fabrique du Temps. Under the direction of Jean Arnault, Louis Vuitton’s watchmaking division has worked to build significant collaborations with the world of independent watchmaking – including, most recently, between Louis Vuitton and De Bethune, for the LVDB-03 GMT Louis Varius GMT And Sympathique Clock, and of course, through the revival of Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta. The Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives provides important material support and publicity to the winner, of course, but it also injects fresh perspectives into the watchmaking at La Fabrique du Temps, and provides a venue for making visible and appreciating the enormous diversity of independent horology.
To find out more, visit The Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives.