Timely fashion

Though horological swagger these days is mostly a masculine sport, the history of wristwatches started with 19th-century aristocratic women, whose attire was unsuited to carrying a pocket watch. They wanted to tell the time in style, so they commissioned bejeweled wristwatches that looked like bracelets. Today, jewelry watches remain in demand in moneyed circles that seek out beauty, opulence and quality mechanical movements. Diamond specialist Backes & Strauss produces 1,000 timepieces a year, the majority of which are jewelry watches. Its customers will spend up to £2 million on these diamond- and gemstone-packed pieces. The company’s latest offering is the Piccadilly Renaissance Ballerina Rainbow, an 18-karat white gold watch with 233 white diamonds and 1,068 multicolored sapphires.

While it is “very difficult to put a label on clients at that level,” says Backes & Strauss chief executive Vartkess Knadjian, the drive to purchase is emotional as well as tactile: “Jewelry watches have to feel good. It must make them feel very special. Nine times out of 10, when someone puts that watch on their wrist, they don’t want to take it off. It’s about falling in love.”

Setting the scene

To create watches that dazzle and feel comfortable, designers put a lot of emphasis on good stone-setting. Harry Winston’s latest jewelry watch, Marble Marquetry, uses minimal platinum to make it look as though the round diamonds and pear-shaped blue sapphires of the strap lie on top of the skin like a luxurious tattoo. The diamond dial uses an invisible-setting technique to ensure legibility.
Traditionally, jewelry watches have focused on the carat count over complicated movements, and indeed, the Marble Marquetry is fitted with a simple quartz caliber. Yet Knadjian believes this is shifting. There is “a growing interest in the horological” element of jewelry watches, he says, with customers demanding mechanical movements to back up the glitz and glamour.

Dior has championed this trend for a few years, taking it a step further by dressing up the oscillating weight — the swinging half-moon pendulum that creates energy to power a mechanical watch. The brand has made the oscillating weight a feature of the dial on some of its watches and smothered it with glittering decorations.

Flower arrangements

In the past, Dior has used feathers or gold latticework, but this year, its Grand Bal Miss Dior collection has layers of embellished, diamond-strewn petals that tap into the floral theme that has shaped 2018’s jewelry watches.

Chanel is another house that’s incorporated flower motifs, taking inspiration from the painted blooms on the Chinese lacquered screens that founder Coco Chanel treasured. Just like those coromandels, the allure of jewelry watches has survived through the centuries and continues to evolve.

What’s their secret?

It took jewelry designer Glenn Spiro two years to create his first watch, which launched exclusively at Harrods in March. Spiro’s jewels often have complex hidden mechanics, such as his Butterfly ring, which can flutter its wings with the bend of a finger (Beyoncé recently donated one of hers to the V&A Museum in London). So it was no surprise that his first foray into timepieces would be with a secret watch.

Secret watches are a genre of timepiece allowing wearers to show or conceal the dial on a whim, usually by way of a hinged jewel that swings across to obscure it. Actress Dakota Fanning sported a beautiful example of this on the red carpet at the Venice International Film Festival in August, when she wore a Jaeger-LeCoultre 101 Feuille. This rose gold secret watch features a delicate leaf with baguette-cut and round brilliant diamonds that can be flipped forward to cover the minuscule square dial (when the 101 first launched in 1929, it was the world’s smallest mechanical watch).

At the Swiss atelier of Spiro’s brand, G, artisans faced a more difficult challenge than a simple hinged flourish: They were asked to follow the design of the house’s Reveal rings, which have bejeweled lotus blooms that twist open to reveal a gemstone bud. The goldsmiths tussled with modifications to make it fit around an ETA watch movement. The diamond setting of the blooms alone — available in either gold or Spiro’s signature metal, titanium — took three months to complete, as every petal had to be set on both sides.

Like all secret watches, the beauty of a Reveal timepiece is its ability to masquerade as a bracelet. Another star in this field is Bulgari, which is celebrating a century of designing watches for women this year. While its first offering in 1918 was a diamond-set, Art Deco-style dress watch, its most iconic design is the Serpenti, a winding snake that wraps around the arm. Some of these coiling timekeepers proudly display a dial where a snake’s head should be; however, the more sought-after designs hide the watch within a serpent’s mouth, which can snap shut as required.

The enduring allure of secret watches was in evidence at Christie’s last month, when two such designs came up for sale. The more expensive of the two, a yellow gold Serpenti with tiger’s-eye scales, ruby cabochon eyes and an old-cut, brown diamond, sold for CHF 564,500 ($562,000), more than triple its high estimate.

Image: Piccadilly Renaissance Ballerina Rainbow by Backes & Strauss backesandstrauss.com / Marble Marquetry by Harry Winston harrywinston.com

Article from the Rapaport Magazine - December 2018. To subscribe click here.