SpotlightSIHH 2018: The Complete Trend Report

After we recovered from all the excitement of SIHH 2018, we took a step back to really observe all the lists of everyone’s favourite pieces, the most prominent releases from all the brands, and other major highlights. As usual, the most exclusive watch fair of the year presented some stunning new collections, admirable innovations, and striking new designs. Setting the tone for what’s to come in the year ahead, SIHH often gives us a glimpse of even what we might expect from Baselworld, the much bigger event that takes place in March. Hence, even though fewer brands exhibit their latest at the more exclusive SIHH in Geneva, it’s safe to say that what we see at the fair does indicate what the shelves in watch stores across the world will look like over the year ahead. It’s also interesting to see how the luxury watch industry evolves as a whole, with intriguing parallels seen across several of their new offerings.

Past And Present Milestones

It’s not unusual for some brand or the other to arrive at a significant milestone every year. With so many watch manufacturers out there, someone or the other is bound to be celebrating a centenary of a brand, or some other jubilee every year. However, in recent times, it seems to have become all the more important for brands to play up their own bicentennials or even anniversaries of specific collections.

While last year, it was Cartier celebrating 100 years of the Tank collection and Jaeger-LeCoultre celebrating 25 years of their Master watches, this year, it was Audemars Piguet marking the silver jubilee of the Royal Oak Offshore line. The brand new Royal Oak Offshore Tourbillon Chronograph was one of the most talked about new releases at the fair this year. Montblanc, on the other hand, released an upgraded version of the Star Legacy Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph, the original of which was unveiled 10 years ago, in 2008, as the brand’s first in-house movement. Since then, the Richemont Group-owned brand has been taken more seriously as a watchmaker, and it was certainly important for them to remind everyone of that.

And taking their heritage a step further was the Montblanc 1858 collection that marks 160 years of the Minerva manufacture that they acquired in 2006 – a major step in their journey towards being regarded highly as manufacturers. The collection was inspired by Minerva’s professional watches from the first half of the 20th century that were military timepieces and made for mountain exploration.

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There were also brand anniversaries that made a prominent presence at the fair. The most notable was definitely the Jubilee Edition that commemorates IWC’s 150th anniversary. The most unified series seen at the fair – owing to its use of only blue or white dials – this line celebrated all of the brand’s major pillars, from the Da Vinci to the Pilot’s Watch lines. While the edition has some high-complication pieces such as the Portugieser Constant Force Tourbillon and Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon, the brand also released a Tribute To Pallweber pocket watch. This new pocket watch and its wristwatch versions feature an update of a digital display from a mechanical movement, pioneered by watchmaker Josef Pallweber in 1884. These are also in white or blue.

Resurrected Or Remembered

Also celebrating an anniversary this year is Jaeger-LeCoultre, completing 185 years. They presented their ‘Made of makers’ campaign that celebrates the brand’s spirit of making and creating products of high value, as well as associating with those from other fields who do the same. This includes Casa Fagliano, the Argentinian makers of bespoke leather shoes, who have also created straps for some Jaeger-LeCoultre watches. However, the biggest story they told this year was that of their new collection. The 185-year-old watch manufacturers have drawn from their archives, more specifically an old diver’s watch from 1968 – the Memovox Polaris – to introduce a brand new pillar of fine timekeeping called the Polaris collection. The new Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris watches have been unveiled in several variations, including automatic, date, chronograph and chronograph world timer versions.

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Another major collection revival was the Cartier Santos collection. Here it was Cartier who didn’t miss this opportunity to remind everyone of their legacy, through the fact that they were the first to have put a watch on the wrist. They spoke of the origins of the Santos collection and how Louis Cartier created the Santos wristwatch for his aviator friend, Alberto Santos-Dumont, to wear and look at conveniently while flying. The new collection more than does justice to the iconic square case design of its predecessors, while renewing it for modern tastes and adaptability.

Tributes continued as A. Lange & Sohne paid tribute to the late Walter Lange of the founding family, with a timepiece featuring a stoppable, jumping sweep-seconds hands, an innovation developed by Ferdinand Adolphe Lange in 1876. Brands also looked outside of their own history in order to build new legacy. One such exhibitor was Baume & Mercier, building on their motorsports-themed Clifton Club watches – a product of their new association with Indian Motorcycle, the American manufacturers of high-end motorcycles. This new Clifton Club series includes a limited edition watch that pays tribute to Burt Munro, a record-setting New Zealander motorcyclist from the 1960s.

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Homemade Timekeeping Goodness

Also adding to their portfolio was Baume & Mercier’s new collection, the Clifton Baumatic, which is not only a COSC-certified official chronometer watch; it’s also the brand’s first in-house movement. An accomplishment that can certainly be regarded as a landmark for the brand, this officially puts Baume & Mercier in the league of movement manufacturers. Entering this territory has become a priority for several brands in recent years. To be taken seriously as a maison de la haute horlogerie, it certainly makes a difference if you’ve got a few manufacture movements under your belt. In fact, brands like Oris have celebrated accomplishments like this, by including watches featuring their in-house calibres in the esteemed Oris Artelier collection.

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Taking the effort to develop and manufacture their own movements even further this year was Panerai. The watch manufacturers of Italian origin have come a step closer to becoming one of those distinguished watchmaking establishments who only create watches powered by their own manufactured movements. The new 2018 edition of their Luminor collection features new movements, putting an end to Officine Panerai’s dependence on ETA-manufactured movements or any movements made outside of the Richemont Group, which Panerai is a part of. With these new movements in the Luminor Due timepieces, the watches itself have become a little slimmer than previous editions. But slimming down is not the only way the Luminor watches became smaller.

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A Sizeable Number Of Smaller Sizes

The Luminor Due 38mm has become the smallest watch ever from Panerai, a brand that has always been known for their oversized or chunky timepieces. This year, though, they want to be an option even to those who have smaller wrists, or generally prefer smaller or lighter watches. Joining the category of watches under 40mm obviously has something to do with the fact that small is generally the way to go. Oversized cases are out, unless the sizes are justified by the movements housed within, as in the case of high-complication timepieces, absolutely packed with components. However, brands are even trying to compress their automatic movements down to the bare minimum, so as to produce timepieces with smaller cases. Baume & Mercier, in fact, accomplished quite a feat in that regard, and with their first in-house movement at that. The new Baumatic chronometer is just 40mm in diameter, and for a watch that houses an automatic movement offering an impressive power reserve of five days, a case thickness of 10.3mm is quite thin.

Although, ‘thin’ got an all-new meaning this year. Over the years, the distinction of having the thinnest watches ever has been held by brands such as Bulgari, with their Octo Finissimo Ultra-Thin line; Vacheron Constantin, with their Overseas and Patrimony Contemporaine Ultra-Thin series; and Chopard, with their L.U.C XP and XPS Ultra-Thin watches. Piaget has enjoyed that distinction several time, and this year, they’ve reclaimed it. Making the automatic watch thinner than ever, was the new Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Automatic, at a baffling thickness of only 4.3mm. This was introduced in December, prior to the fair, and at SIHH 2018, they leapt further ahead by presenting the Altiplano Ultimate Concept manual-winding watch, which comes in an unbelievable case thickness of just 2mm. What’s next!

A View Inside Brilliant New Mechanisms

With the dial off-centre on the new Altiplano Ultimate watches from Piaget, other components have a skeletonised appearance on the face. Skeleton displays have, in fact, been quite a dominant trend that emerged from SIHH 2018. While Audemars Piguet’s special Royal Oak Offshore Tourbillon was unveiled in a gorgeous skeleton dial, the inner mechanisms of Panerai’s high-complication pieces – L’Astronomo and the Lo Scienziato – were also displayed with pride. It goes without saying that most tourbillon cages are anyway a matter of pride for their makers, and are almost always showcased in all their splendour. This was seen this year in Montblanc’s Exo-Tourbillon and IWC’s Constant Force and Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon pieces, to name a few.

One brand that had skeleton displays on multiple new timepieces was Girard-Perregaux. From their Minute Repeater Tri-Axial Tourbillon, with its beautiful titanium-gong chime, to the first ever skeleton version of their Neo-Tourbillon With Three Bridges, they were all about open-worked mechanisms. Girard-Perregaux also had a flying tourbillon variation in their Laureato series, which featured a ‘graphically designed mechanical self-winding movement open-worked in the extreme’. Even the latest editions of their Classic Bridges in rose gold displayed the brilliance of their movements.

Then there was Ulysse Nardin, with their new Freak, a line that has for years been known to house the entire movement in the timekeeping hands itself. The brand was not about to change that with their first self-winding Freak launched at SIHH 2018 – the Freak Vision.

Skeleton watches hit another level with Cartier’s ‘Mysterious’ watches. The beauty in these skeleton pieces is presented with transparency and minimalistic finesse. While the Rotonde de Cartier Skeleton Mysterious Double Tourbillon features a tourbillon cage that seemingly floats in mid-air, the Rotonde De Cartier Mysterious Hours watch presents the time-telling hands seemingly unattached to anything. The truth is that the mysterious skeleton displays are realised through layered components and gears in crystal, in cleverly concealed mechanisms that attach themselves to relevant parts of the movements in other sections of the watch cases. Cartier even included skeleton versions in some of their other new editions, including the new Santos skeleton piece.

Spoilt For Choices In Straps

In a world where variety is the spice of life, it was only a matter of time until even luxury watchmakers would begin to make their products adaptable. In that spirit, there were a number of exhibitors at SIHH 2018 who presented watches that not only offered interchangeable straps and bracelets, but even those that wearers could change themselves. Some have even included this feature with convenient mechanisms that can be operated without tools.

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The new Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris collection had timepieces – including the chronograph variation – which came with the option of switching between stainless steel bracelets and leather straps, both with deployment buckles. Baume & Mercier’s Baumatic watches also offered something similar, and with a classical design like the Baumatic’s, a choice like this allows you so many variations with just one timepiece. However, the brand that made interchangeability the most effortless was Cartier, whose QuickSwitch system in the new Santos series allows you to change the bracelet by the easy press of a button at the back of the watch, and securely attach another with an effortless click. They took an extra step, by giving wearers the ability to adjust the length of metallic bracelets themselves, by removing extra links, through buttons behind the ‘SmartLinks’ on the straps.

In Blue Hues

The palette seen in the new collections presented didn’t exactly reflect bursts of colour among most brands. There were some exceptions though that did include hints of unusual hues, such as mint green in Panerai’s Luminor Due, or the deep red in Baume & Mercier’s Clifton Club Indian Burt Munro Tribute Limited Edition. However, the one colour that made the deepest impact in those ivory and beige halls of the fair was blue. While it’s known that blue is a classic hue in watchmaking – after black and white of course – seen in various elements such as blued steel hands or moon-phase displays – the amount of blue in this year’s watches has been overwhelming.

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For instance, practically half of IWC’s 2018 collection featured blue lacquered dials, owing to the strict visual code of their Jubilee Edition pieces. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s entire Rendez-Vous 2018 collection incorporates blue straps and/or dials. Blue leather straps were, in fact, seen across the board, in Baume & Mercier’s new Baumatic, Classima, and Hampton watches, Cartier’s new and updated Drive de Cartier, and even in one of the Casa Fagliano-made straps on Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso timepieces. Cooler shades of blue were seen in Richard Mille’s new Ultimate Polo Watch, and in Panerai’s new Luminor Due, which even used a blue in an Oro Rosso version, and in a stitched fabric strap of a larger Due piece. Blue dials were seen in Girard-Perregaux’s Laureato collection, Vacheron Constantin’s Overseas Dual Time, Van Cleef & Arpels’ gorgeous Lady Arpels Planetarium, and of course, in the Ulysse Nardin Freak Vision, which was an all-blue piece.

From lines of inspiration and stories told, to the advancement in technology and the features the watches hold, there was so much to discover at SIHH 2018. It’s, of course, no surprise that in this digital age, the art of mechanical watchmaking faces a threat, and it’s an art worth preserving and nurturing. Hence it’s good to see that some of the most respectable names in haute horlogerie are letting the world see why they’ve been respected through the decades, and the genius in everything they still have to offer. After discovering all these 2018 trends in watchmaking, we’re certainly looking forward to seeing if the trends that unravel at Baselworld in March are along the same lines. Are you?

Do scroll down to comment and tell us what you think of the year ahead in timekeeping.