How Islamic Art Informed Cartier’s Now-Signature Style
Courtesy Cartier
In 1847, French jeweler Louis-François Cartier established a business that bore his last name and specialized in jewels and precious trinkets. About five decades later, the company’s focus expanded to include accessories of its own design. One of Cartier’s grandsons, Louis, joined the family business as its creative director, and set out to find inspiration for developing a distinct visual language that Cartier could call its own.
At the time, Paris was the epicenter of the Islamic art trade, and Louis learned firsthand about the geometric shapes and unexpected color combinations that decorate items from Islamic culture by visiting exhibitions on the subject—including ones at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs—and traveling to several countries, including Egypt, India, and Turkey. He sent his younger brother, Jacques, an expert in precious stones, to India and the Persian Gulf to experience the culture, connect with potential clients, and bring back objects and materials, such as natural pearls, for them to behold. “Beauty, and the curiosity to discover different forms of it, are foundational principles at Cartier,” says Pierre Rainero, the company’s director of image, style, and heritage. “We’ve always looked for beauty elsewhere, in non-Western cultures and in other disciplines.”
A just-opened exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs titled “Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity” (on view through Feb. 20, 2022) explores the lasting impact such pieces have had on the house’s designs. (It will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art, which co-organized the project, next spring.) The show, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (whose co-founder, Elizabeth Diller, was the guest on Ep. 9 of our Time Sensitive podcast), features more than 500 pieces—including Islamic art, books, jewelry, and objects as well as photographs, documents, and other artifacts from Cartier’s archives—that illustrate the creative process that shaped the house’s now-signature style.
The presentation is divided into two parts that form a chronological timeline from the start of the 20th century to today. Visitors first encounter a section focused on the emergence of Islamic art and architecture in Paris, and pieces the Cartier brothers turned to as muses. Among them are objects from Louis’s personal collection, including Indian jewelry, Persian miniature drawings, and opulent Indian pen boxes, set with gold, turquoise, and ivory.
The second half demonstrates how elements borrowed from Islamic art manifest in Cartier designs. While surveying the intricate pieces, some might notice how the motifs on the bindings of the books Louis owned are reproduced, pared down, or reworked to form new patterns. Others may regard increasingly bold mixtures of hues and materials, such as a striking “bib” necklace made from gold, platinum, turquoise, amethyst, and diamonds. Commissioned by the Duke of Windsor for the Duchess of Windsor in 1947, the necklace exhibits the same vibrant blue and violet composition found in Indian enamels. There’s also a diamond-encrusted platinum-and-turquoise tiara from 1936 that reproduces a delicate paisley motif from a headpiece worn by a “female tumbler” seen in a 19th-century Persian painting. A few cigarette cases even incorporate actual cut-outs from Persian miniature drawings onto their enameled and diamond-set surfaces.
Looking at the range of works on view, the exhibition seems to suggest that the influence of Islamic art extends far beyond the jewelry house, and into other cultures and societies across time—a sentiment that Cyrille Vigneron, Cartier’s president and CEO, voiced at the exhibition’s opening last week. Reinterpreting “the richness of other cultures,” he says, “if done respectfully, and without misappropriation, can lead us to create even more beautiful things.”
La Samaritaine, a historic Parisian department store that towers over the banks of the Seine, spent the last 16 years undergoing an extensive renovation to its art deco building, first built in 1869 and reconstructed in 1930, and the surrounding neighborhood. It reemerged last month as a contemporary campus for top-tier French food, shopping, and culture, anchored by the five-star Cheval Blanc Paris hotel. Inside, the Dior Spa Cheval Blanc—a collaboration between the hotel chain and the French fashion house—promises “happiness in the heart of Paris,” a tall order somehow made attainable through its distinctive blend of wellness treatments and considered design, the latter created by architect Peter Marino. The spa’s director, Sophie Levy Kraemer, and her team spent five years developing a robust array of remedies that combine manual procedures, state-of-the-art technology, and Dior skin-care products. She also worked closely with Marino on the interior, including its textures, colors, furniture, and fixtures. The result is a one-of-a-kind multisensory retreat for the body and mind.
Guests enter by descending a winding limestone staircase lined with woven silver-thread panels, and onto a landing that faces a mosaic-tiled pool that spans nearly 100 feet—the largest in any hotel in town. Natural materials such as oak and leather inform the beige palette of the waiting room, which has the cozy appeal of an elegant Parisian apartment. Procedures take place in one of six spaces, each inspired by a different trait of Dior’s founder, Christian Dior. On a wall in the Mitzah suite, for example, hand-laminated partridge feathers reference an iconic leopard-print outfit worn by the fashion designer’s muse, Mitzah Bricard, while the Sauvage suite, alluding to Dior’s reverence for nature and the architect of La Samaritaine’s 1930 renovation, Henri Sauvage, features a heated, custom-made massage bed lined with alpha-quartz crystals.
A similar sense of tranquil refinement runs through the 48 treatments on offer. Performed by Dior beauty ambassadors (who are trained, as a statement by the spa describes, “by touch, to feel the energy circulating through every tissue”), each technique is a tactile conversation with the body. Guests might opt for the Radiance Detox, involving a thermo-heating mask that eliminates impurities and boosts circulation, or the Precious Energy massage, which uses a series of hot stones—labradorite for grounding and protection, yellow quartz for balance, agate for harmony, and rock crystal for detoxification—to bring out positive energy.
The spa also provides ways to bring its calming experiences home. It’s the only retailer of Dior’s delicately floral Cheval Blanc perfume, created specifically for the space by the house’s nose, François Demachy, as well as a line of Bains de Visage purifying face mists, nodding to the public baths that once occupied a boat anchored on the Seine in front of the building. To incorporate the treatments into your daily beauty regimen, there’s Solutions Professionnelles, a collection of high-performance skin-care products developed by Dior specifically for the spa. We suggest picking up the line’s matrix-firming bioserum, silky peeling lotion, or creamy repairing complex before departing from this heavenly sanctuary.
“Berbere was the first design I did that had the ability to become a new classic,” Gaia Repossi says of her first collection for Repossi, the Paris-based jewelry house that was founded in Turin, Italy, by her grandfather in 1957. She debuted Berbere in 2011, four years after she became the artistic director of her family business at age 21, and its signature elements—architectural geometry, dynamic asymmetry, impeccable mirror polishing, and juxtaposition of fullness and space—have since become defining features of the house’s aesthetic, and have been expanded into some 200 designs in four shades of gold.
Berbere represents Repossi’s personal take on the multi-lined tattoos that are customarily inked on the hands and bodies of the nomadic Tuareg women, who are part of North Africa’s Berber people, to protect against evil, cure illnesses, or serve as a social marker. Repossi, who holds a master’s degree in archaeology, translated motifs derived from the ethnic group’s time-honored tradition into minimalistic jewelry. In doing so, she established a fresh, lighthearted version of the opulence for which the Repossi brand is known, and a new canon for how modern, avant-garde jewelry might look and feel.
To mark Berbere’s 10th anniversary, Repossi added colored lacquer to a new series of rings called Chromatic Cities. Each piece consists of the collection’s classic double band—connected under the finger and separated by the designer’s characteristic void—where a thin ring, set with pavé diamonds, hovers near a thick, lacquered ring in one of seven shades that represent the place where the accessory is sold. (A wine-colored version for Paris, and an electric-blue one for New York, were released this week, following editions for Tokyo, Miami, Monaco, Dubai, and London that were revealed earlier this year.) Another celebratory piece, the Berbere Chromatic 10 Years ring, comes in navy lacquer on rose gold, with the slimmer band in black gold and is lined with 38 stones.
Surveying Berbere’s growth over the years, what’s perhaps most striking is the collection’s adaptability: Its design language allowed Repossi to experiment with less conventional pieces, such as ear cuffs or rings made to be worn on two phalanges of a finger. In each piece, she remains true to Berbere’s origins and its wearable, second-skin sensibility, resulting in a design that will likely endure for many decades to come.
“This is a new world,” says Cyrille Vigneron, president and CEO of Cartier, during a gala dinner he recently hosted on the gleaming shores of Lake Como, “and we must awaken all our senses to rediscover it.” The event marked the unveiling of Sixième Sens (“Sixth Sense”), the luxury house’s newest collection. He continues, “High jewelry belongs to the world of sensory stimulation. It magically awakens the senses with vivid emotions that move your heart.”
The Sixth Sense collection is both a renaissance, as Vigneron suggests, and timeless Cartier style, expressed in new ways. Since 1847, when the house was founded, that style has been captured in signature motifs, executed in original pieces with exceptional know-how—many of which are found in the first 90 pieces of the collection, which debuted in Italy in July. Revisiting the classics to honor their eternal appeal has been central to the strategy of Vigneron since he took the top job at Cartier, in 2016, and this heritage-based approach shines bright in the new collection.
Particularly radiant is the bold Pixelage necklace, an abstract rendition of a panther’s coat, one such classic that has graced Cartier’s creations since 1914. This time, the animal is reduced to its “pixelated” image in white and yellow diamonds, punctuated by touches of onyx and set around three golden topazes weighing at 27.34 carats. The Udyana necklace, composed of carved and sculpted emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, is another standout. Its design recalls Jacques Cartier’s travels across India, where, a century ago, he found inspiration in the exotic extravagance of jewels from the Mughal courts. Audacity is also a characteristic of Cartier’s style, found here in the Phaan ring, which features an 8.20-carat ruby set directly above a 4.01-carat rose-cut diamond. The clever tiered construct intensifies the blood-red hues of the ruby by catching the light that traverses the diamond underneath.
“High jewelry is mysterious because the precious stones capture millions of years of the earth’s energy,” Vigneron says. “They have the power to transform us by just touching the skin.”
Creating a Swiss mechanical watch that can measure the passage of time with perfect precision is a challenge. And now Tudor, Rolex’s sister brand founded in 1926, has joined Omega as the only two watch companies to have the accuracy of their timepieces certified by one of Switzerland’s most demanding public entities.
The Tudor Black Bay Ceramic, introduced in May, comes with a Master Chronometer certification from the Institut Fédéral de Métrologie, a Swiss government agency commonly known as METAS.
The certification confirms that each watch keeps exact time while withstanding myriad environmental assaults — including the passage of time itself.
This also allows Tudor to disrupt Omega’s industry domination of precision timekeeping, begun in 2015 when Omega’s parent company, the Swatch group, helped METAS establish its testing program.
Omega, however, still leads on volume, with Master Chronometer certifications for nearly every watch in its collections, starting with the 2015 Globemaster. The distinction encompasses its entire range of Seamasters, produced in conjunction with its role as official timekeeper at the Tokyo Olympic Games, and its $6,300 Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch, released earlier this year.
Since 2015 — when Tudor debuted the MT5621, its first movement made in-house — it had been considering ways to prove the quality of its timepieces, according to Christophe Chevalier, a spokesman for the brand.
“We looked for an independent institution to provide a benchmark against which we could measure that quality,” he said, and “we found that METAS sets the highest public standard for watches.” (Its tests, done on completed watches, are more rigorous than the testing of uncased movements done by the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres, a nonprofit association supervised by five watchmaking cantons and the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.)
METAS “is the Swiss equivalent to the National Institute of Standards in the U.S.,” said Jürg Niederhauser, the agency’s head of corporate affairs, based in Wabern, near Bern.
“Our requirements,” he wrote in an email, “are specifically designed to test the resistance of a mechanical watch to strong magnetic fields, its accuracy under different temperature conditions and in changing positions, its power reserve and finally its water resistance.”
The tests are done with the watch in six different positions, to account for the effects of gravity on precision timekeeping, and at both 100 percent and 33 percent of power reserve.
The Institut Fédéral de Métrologie, or METAS, awarded a Master Chronometer certification for the Tudor Black Bay Ceramic.
The METAS certification bumps the Black Bay Ceramic up a notch on the technicality scale for an unlimited production model in a 41-millimeter, full ceramic case and ceramic bezel insert, with the new MT5602-1U caliber and a $4,725 price.
Each watch comes with a guarantee card and a chip that, scanned with a smartphone, produces a report on its METAS tests. “You don’t need to download an app because all the relevant performance data is embedded in the card that also identifies the watch by its serial number and has its complete guarantee status,” Mr. Chevalier said.
There is now one more Master Chronometer-certified model in the Tudor range: the Black Bay GMT in an aged gunmetal steel. But the watch, which allows its wearer to tell the time in three zones simultaneously, is to be sold Nov. 6 by Christie’s Geneva in the next edition of Only Watch, a biennial auction of one-of-a-kind timepieces to support research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Tudor rarely makes one-off watches, so the model’s sale estimate of 4,000 to 8,000 Swiss francs ($4,375 to $8,750) may be conservative.
After all, the last time a one-of-a-kind Black Bay came up for sale — at the 2019 Only Watch auction — it hammered for 350,000 Swiss francs.
“I don’t just look at stones. I need to touch them, and feel the life inside them,” says Lucia Silvestri, who sources gems for the high-jewelry house Bulgari and serves as its creative director. “There’s sensuality in the energy of gems born in the depths of the earth.” Such vitality shines through Magnifica, a 122-piece collection made from luscious, primarily cabochon-cut stones, forming some of the most exquisite pieces designed by the Roman jeweler to date. (Some 200 other items will be added to the collection later this year.)
Unveiled last week in Milan, the line is designed as a tribute to rare gems, the artisans who make the brand’s opulent baubles, and the women who inspire them. Standouts include the Hypnotic Emerald choker, featuring Bulgari’s signature diamond-encrusted serpent nibbling at a 93-carat Colombian emerald; the platinum Metamorphosis necklace, which can be worn in nine different ways and is distinguished by an antique 12-carat cushion-cut Mozambique ruby; and the Mediterranean Queen, a collar inspired by a Bulgari necklace from the ’60s and made from white gold with diamonds, emeralds, and Paraiba tourmalines that weigh in at nearly 500 carats. While imposing in size, each piece is supple, tactile, and surprisingly lightweight.
Magnifica’s vibrant hues and sculptural forms nod to the distinct aesthetic that Bulgari has refined over its 137-year history, particularly in the 1970s, when it opened its first overseas boutique in New York’s Pierre Hotel and its jewelry’s bold tones, generous proportions, geometric shapes, and daring combinations of precious and semiprecious stones set the business apart. Bulgari’s meticulous dedication to its craft especially served a purpose last year, when, with traveling curtailed, Silvestri spent more time than usual in the company’s Italian workshops and guided artisans in creating its latest expertly made pieces. “It is our response to these times,” Silvestri says, “a message of joy and artistic perfection, a magnificent renaissance.”
In Boucheron’s Latest Collection, Holographic Effects Meet High Jewelry
Courtesy Boucheron
“I’m constantly looking for new links between light and color, but my collections always start as a dream,” says Claire Choisne, creative director of the Parisian jewelry house Boucheron. “Then we use research from our in-house R and D to turn that dream into a concrete idea.” While jewelry houses usually look to their pasts to give life to new creations, Choisne has her sights firmly set on the realm of the unexpected when designing accessories for the 163-year-old company. Her latest collection, Holographique, unveiled this week in Paris during the city’s fall/winter 2021 haute couture fashion shows, is yet another foray onto a terrain of experimentation, where traditional craftsmanship meets technology in a series of audaciously radiant, one-off creations.
The 27-piece line is striking not only due to the generous volumes of Boucheron’s signature rock-crystal pieces and opal cabochons, but also the mesmerizing color spectrum that Choisne achieved by enhancing natural materials with techniques derived from manufacturing and science. Its most showstopping pieces, such as the Holographique necklace, use an industrial process to spectacular effect: Composed of rounded slices of rock crystal and edged in white gold and diamonds around a 20.21-carat central yellow sapphire, the collar is covered in a holographic coating—made from tiny particles of molten titanium and silver oxide by Saint-Gobain, the seasoned French producer of high-performance industrial materials—that’s typically used on airport runway lights, lenses, and mirrored glass. Transparent and imperceptible to the touch, the compound brings a special luminescence to many of Holographique’s baubles, and varies in intensity depending on the number of layers applied.
Other pieces dazzle with a similar space-age energy. The collection’s Opalescence and Ondes pieces feature white Ethiopian opals that are juxtaposed with diamonds, mother-of-pearl, or strands of graduated opal beads, intensifying their chromatic allure. “To bring out the fire of opals, we created the optical illusion that their color was ‘spilling over’ onto gemstones that we set to imitate their appearance,” Choisne says. The Faisceaux brooch, featuring faceted, conical rock crystals and diamonds set in pink gold, and the flower-shaped Chromatique rings, formed by curved ceramic petals developed from digital scans of peonies and pansies, shine with an unusual luster, exemplifying Choisne’s penchant for reinterpreting classic motifs in Boucheron’s lexicon through an ultramodern lens. “We wanted to capture the colors of the rainbow, the hues of the aurora borealis, or the reflections of a soap bubble,” she says. Surveying Choisne’s iridescent designs, it appears that she succeeded in expressing the magic of the tones, too.
The latest crypto-token craze is spilling over into watches.
Following a torrent of record prices for digital assets from artwork to sneakers, the first watch NFT — or “nonfungible token,” verified by blockchain technology — was offered early this month. It didn’t sell, and the auction has been extended.
But other NFT prices, realized on online platforms and by traditional auction houses, seem to signal that NFTs are attracting investors as well as creating new ways to own or just enjoy watches as dematerialized assets. And more watch NTF auctions are scheduled.
The first watch NFT to go on sale was the Bigger Bang All Black Tourbillon Chronograph Special Piece, offered by Jean-Claude Biver, the industry veteran who emerged from retirement to seize an opportunity to make history.
“What we are doing today is a world first that will have wings,” Mr. Biver said in a Zoom presentation on March 30, at the beginning of the original six-day auction. “We are at the start of something great.”
[“Still Don’t Get What an NTF Is?” Here’s a quick explanation.]
Mr. Biver’s NFT was a digital photograph — referred to as a “digital twin” — that he took of the prototype Hublot Bigger Bang All Black Tourbillon Chronograph in his private collection. (“I would never sell the watch,” he said. “It is true reference, and the genesis of every model made since 2005 by Hublot.”)
It was accompanied by a code-stamped, cryptographic signature that provided a record of the image’s authenticity and provenance. Such tokens live on a blockchain, a digital ledger used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Mr. Biver has achieved many “firsts” in his 43-year career, notably in 2015 when, as chief executive of TAG Heuer, he secured an unprecedented collaboration with Google and Intel to bring Silicon Valley technology to Swiss watchmaking with the brand’s first connected watches.
Presumably being “first” also matters in the emerging NFT marketplace, which would explain the last-minute maneuvering for the watch world’s distinction.
On March 25, the watch brand Jacob & Company announced that it would offer the first watch NFT on the new platform ArtGrails. (The piece, a digital-only SF24 Tourbillon Piece Unique, went on sale April 4, but it was interrupted and started again as a new auction that ended on Thursday.)
But on March 30, Mr. Biver began his auction on the OpenSea platform, with the aid of Carlos Moreira, founder and chief executive of WISeKey International Holding, a cybersecurity company based in Geneva. A giant image of Mr. Biver and Mr. Moreira flashed on the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square to let everyone know the auction had started.
But five days later, only three bids could be seen — 1 ether that was the equivalent of about $2,078 as of April 5; 1.05 ether, or about $2,182; and 25 ether, or about $51,961 — none of which met the undisclosed reserve price. Now, the auction has been extended to April 30.
The Jacob & Company NFT was a 3-D animation produced by the brand and inspired by its Epic SF24 travel watch, but with two added features to make it a bespoke digital creation: a tourbillon and a split-flap system displaying the names of 10 cryptocurrencies.
“Our watch NFT is a purely digital, tokenized asset that only exists in the digital space,” Benjamin Arabov, chief executive of Jacob & Company, said during a video interview on March 30 from New York.
On April 5, a day into the auction, “it got so many bidders that the platform couldn’t handle it and crashed,” Mr. Arabov said. “It went up to $3.1 million and then the whole thing came crashing down.”
The sale was restarted April 7, this time for a 24-hour period to reduce the risk of “hackers,” Mr. Arabov said. The final price was 50.74 ether, or about $100,000.
“A lot of my collector clients are intrigued by NFTs, because they are new and different,” Avery Andon, an art dealer and founder of the NFT platform ArtGrails, said in a video interview from Miami. “But NFTs will take some getting used to.”
Will watch collectors be inclined to buy digital watches pegged to a blockchain token, without ever possessing an actual watch?
“NFTs derive their value from their scarcity,” Mr. Andon said. “This Jacob & Company NFT is the only one in the world, and serious watch and NFT collectors see inherent value in that.”
And, Mr. Arabov said, “Most watch collectors keep their watches in the safe 99 percent of the time, anyway.”
Beside assurances of provenance and scarcity, the Jacob & Company NFT was sold with a bit of watch purchasing tradition: a paper certificate and a storage box fitted with a hard drive to store the NFT.
“As a watch collector myself, I love the experience of the box and papers,” Mr. Andon said. “That is why we replicated that physical experience here, except you are not getting a watch, only this very rare token.”
With more and more investors eyeing digital riches, the volume of global NFT trades surpassed $500 million in March, with $240 million in that month alone. Watch auctioneers are just getting in the game.
On April 23, Sotheby’s is scheduled to become the first major auction house to sell a watch NFT when a Ressence Spymaster comes up for sale in Hong Kong along with its NFT, a computer-generated video of the watch.
“The NFT digital video which accompanies the watch seems just the right way to emphasize its true value,” Sam Hines, Sotheby’s head of watches, said in a news release.
And on the same day, Phillips is scheduled to sell a digital artwork titled “Replicator,” by the artist Mad Dog Jones, whose real name is Michah Dowbak. The piece, listed in an online auction, is described as having the ability to reproduce itself every 28 days, resulting in seven generations of artworks.
The auction house also has been “approached to sell tokenized watches, a request we are taking very seriously,” said Arthur Touchot, head of digital strategy at Phillips, who is based in Geneva.
Whether NFTs become a watershed moment in the watch market or a bubble inflated by abstract financial schemes, only time will tell.
But Mr. Arabov of Jacob & Company said that watch NFTs would help push the limits of creativity by freeing watchmakers from material constraints. And, he said, his company already plans to present an entire NFT collection that will be “far more creative than any real-life watch” but that “will live exclusively in NFT world.”
If watch NFTs became “wearable” using augmented reality, like Gucci’s Virtual 25 sneakers, it would not be hard to imagine fans vying to own the digital version of an otherwise unattainable watch — like a Patek Philippe Nautilus or Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona — that could be “worn” and boasted about, even if only on social media.
“This sale was to get people to pay attention to NFTs,” Mr. Arabov said. “It is not a matter of ‘if’ NFTs will have a place in watches, but ‘when,’ and that ‘when’ is now.”
Production has increased sharply in recent years, yet just two new timepieces include the gems.
The Barillet Superpunk Diamants Lab Experience collection uses lab-grown diamonds.
Many watch brands are using alternate materials like recycled plastics and cardboard packaging. But only recently have a couple of brands turned to decorative gem-quality diamonds produced in a laboratory, a change that has been a long time coming.
In February, the French brand Barillet used lab-grown diamonds to bring a touch of pizazz to its Superpunk Diamants Lab Experience collection. And last September, the Japanese brand Citizen included them in its L Ambiluna women’s watches.
Each of Barillet’s unisex watches, powered by a Swiss automatic movement, had 44 lab-grown diamonds set on the hour markers and the case. The brand said that the stones, a total of 0.42 carats on each watch, were chosen for their quality, color and purity.
“We called the watches Lab Experience because we are exploring new territory and experimenting with an innovative product, both technologically and ethically,” Emmanuel Pander, co-founder of Barillet, said in a phone interview from Paris.
“We wanted to start a conversation about the exploitation of our planet’s natural resources and the technical and human means used to extract them,” he said.
The initial run of 10 Superpunks, each priced at 3,950 euros ($4,660) sold out in three weeks, Mr. Pander said, adding that there had been more orders since then. The brand sells online and through its three stores in France.
While lab-created diamonds are only now showing up in watches, a report published in February by the management consultancy Bain & Company said lab-grown diamond production reached a total of six to seven million carats in 2019 and 2020, posting double-digit growth as a result of what it called “continued advances in technology” and “lower retail prices.”
In contrast, rough diamond production in 2020 fell to 111 million carats, down from a peak of 152 million in 2017, according to Bain.
Lab-created diamonds are made by either a High-Pressure, High-Temperature method (known as H.P.H.T.) or the Chemical Vapor Deposition (C.V.D.) method, both simulating the process that produces a natural diamond. The results are optically, chemically and physically identical to mined diamonds, makers say, but, depending on their size, the gems can cost at least 30 to 40 percent less than mined stones.
In 2018, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said that lab-created diamonds could be marketed as real gems, as long as they were clearly labeled, but it later warned makers against blanket claims of “general environmental benefit,” considering the energy used to produce them. In Europe and Asia, there are fewer marketing restrictions.
The diamonds used in Barillet’s Superpunks were supplied by Courbet, a Paris-based jewelry label founded in 2017, in collaboration with a local laboratory, Diam Concept.
“We are in talks now with several watch brands who have shown interest in our lab-grown diamonds,” Manuel Mallen, co-founder of Courbet, said in a phone interview. “They are starting to see ‘lab grown’ as an attractive option, for cost reasons and for their communication value.”
A Courbet gem that is colorless and internally flawless would retail for €10,000, “50 percent less than the price of a comparable mined diamond,” Mr. Mallen said. And, given the growth in the market, the business said it was expanding into China.
A veteran among a growing number of French jewelry retailers that describe themselves as ethically conscious, the privately held Courbet has Chanel as a minority shareholder, though the fashion house has not used lab-grown diamonds for any of its watches and jewelry.
“Chanel keeps a close eye on the evolution of trends in its activities as well as on the emerging expectations of clients and society and regularly invests in start-ups or innovative companies with a long-term perspective, as well as a keen awareness to what is happening in the tech world,” the fashion house said in a written statement. “This is why we have taken a minority stake in the jeweler Courbet. That said, we do not currently plan to use synthetic diamonds.”
Citizen included lab-grown diamonds in its L Ambiluna women’s watches.
Citizen’s lab-grown diamonds were supplied by Swarovski, the Austrian crystal company, which began making them in 2017. And while the brand will continue using lab-grown gems, a spokesman said, it also will make watches with natural diamonds so customers will have options.
In 2017, an effort to demystify lab-grown diamonds — the symposium “Synthetic Diamonds: Are Watchmaking and Jewelry in Danger?” — was held in Geneva, organized by the Association Romande des Métiers de la Bijouterie, a Swiss jewelers’ association.
“The program was educational and positive over all about lab-grown diamonds,” said Marc-André Deschoux, founder of the online channel Watches TV, who attended the event. “A number of watch brand representatives were in the audience.”
But, since then, few mechanical watch brands have made the shift to lab-grown stones. “This is still a taboo subject in Switzerland because of a lingering negative view of man-made diamonds,” Mr. Deschoux said. “But that industry is growing so rapidly that some big brands are anticipating the future and investing in the product.”
One example is Lightbox, introduced in 2019 by De Beers, the diamond company that operates mines. Lightbox sells fashion jewelry set with lab-grown diamonds priced at $800 per carat.
Still, not every brand envisages lab-grown stones in its future.
The Regent Duchess from Backes & Strauss, which does not use man-made diamonds.
“People tell us why not use lab-grown diamonds for your small pavé settings,” Vartkess Knadjian, founder and chief executive of Backes & Strauss, a British jewelry watchmaker, said from Geneva. “We are purists; we will not go down that path.”
“For some watch brands, diamonds are an afterthought,” Mr. Knadjian said. “But we thrive on our diamond heritage, it is important to emphasize the cut and quality of our diamonds.”
Despite market growth, mainly in the jewelry sector, lab-grown diamonds continue to “evoke mixed associations,” according to the Bain report, which said most consumers still considered them “artificial” or “affordable.”
Watch brands hesitate, Mr. Mallen said, because they fear that a conversation about lab-grown diamonds would open the door to questions about their sourcing of other materials, like gold, steel and leather.
“Brands worry about being criticized for all the things they don’t do,” Mr. Mallen said.
If a shift does come in watchmaking, lab-grown and mined diamonds will coexist, not as competitors but as two parallel markets, like in the jewelry sector, Mr. Knadjian said.
“At the moment, there is a sense of wait-and-see about lab-grown diamonds in the watch industry,” he said. “If one major brand decides to use them, others would follow.”
“But even then, people would buy the watch not for its lab-grown diamonds,” Mr. Knadjian said, “but for the watch itself.”
At Patek Philippe, Sometimes Fame Just Isn’t Enough
Fans have been willing to wait years for a Nautilus Ref. 5711, but the company still decided to discontinue it. Will a surprise final series be any solace?
Imagine you are on the waiting list for a Patek Philippe Nautilus — a wait that might be eight or even 10 years long, but at least you’re in line.
Then you see an Instagram post from a Patek fan questioning whether the model is being discontinued.
It turns out to be true. And suddenly the watch that you had expected to buy new for around $33,700 is available only on the secondhand market, selling for as much as $180,000. You would likely be surprised, unhappy — even angry.
And those were the responses of much of the watch world last month when @patekaholic, as Jasem al-Zeraei is known to his 344,000 Instagram followers, teased them with a post suggesting that the Ref. 5711/1A-010, a stainless-steel timepiece with a black-blue dial, would be withdrawn from production this year.
“The reaction has been insane,” Mr. al-Zeraei said Saturday. “People are sad that they won’t get their allocation.”
Some posts castigated the company’s president, Thierry Stern. “There has been so much noise around this Nautilus. My God,” Mr. Stern said in a video interview Friday from his home in Geneva. So why is he discontinuing the Ref. 5711?
“We cannot put a single watch on top of our pyramid,” he said. After all, Patek has 140 models, including 26 other Nautilus variations.
But Mr. Stern offered some hope to disappointed buyers, saying the model “will have a victory lap. We will have a surprise final series of the Ref. 5711. And it is not what was left in the pipeline.”
“How many there will be, I cannot give this information,” he said. “It won’t be enough for everyone who is waiting for one, because that is not possible, but we will do our maximum.”
The stainless-steel 5711, in demand by collectors who can spend years on waiting lists to buy one, is known for its black-blue dial.
When the first Nautilus, the Ref. 3700, was added to the Patek catalog in 1976, it was one of the watch styles that helped revolutionize the perception of luxury by the brand’s use of steel. (Today, steel is used in only about 30 percent of Patek’s annual production of 60,000 watches.)
The Ref. 5711 appeared in 2006, and in recent years — through a combination of social media one-upsmanship and scarcity — it joined the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Selfwinding with a blue dial and three nonvintage Rolexes (the Cosmograph Daytona, the “Pepsi” GMT Master II and the Submariner) at the center of a global obsession with trophy steel watches.
The stars of scores of Instagram channels, the watches ticked all the boxes for collectible timepieces: pedigree, wearability, enduring value and what watch fans call “wrist power.”
“Instagram killed the thrill of owning the Ref. 5711,” Kristian Haagen, a watch collector and author based in Copenhagen, said. “People stopped seeing the watch; they’d only see the money.”
There may be little logic in discontinuing a wildly popular product, especially during a pandemic that the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said had slashed growth in the sector by more than 20 percent. It would be like Hershey deciding to stop making Kisses, or Porsche abandoning the 911.
And the lack of ceremony around the decision to retire the Ref. 5711 just five years shy of the collection’s 50th anniversary has heightened the digital outcry. Mr. al-Zeraei posted on Jan. 3, but the company didn’t confirm until the middle of the month that the model was on the 2021 run-out list, what Patek calls the roster of discontinued watches it sends to retailers and distributors each year.
“This was likely not big news for Patek Philippe, but general frenzy on social media is augmented because people basically want what they can’t have,” said John Reardon, the founder of Collectability, an educational platform and online reseller of vintage Patek Philippes. He formerly was head of watches at Christie’s and worked at Patek for 10 years.
“Ending the Ref. 5711 was a brilliant move,” he said, “because there are too many speculators buying this watch. This is Patek Philippe, not Bitcoin.”
The company, which has made classically elegant, precious-metal watches with complications since 1839, was acquired by the Stern family in 1932. And the Sterns have a long view of watchmaking, reflected in the company’s advertising slogan: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
Mr. Stern has said little about the Nautilus cancellation, but he talked last week with The New York Times. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Why did you decide to end the Ref. 5711?
A watch should not be a top leader on its own. That is too dangerous.
I always have two goals in mind. To protect Patek Philippe as an industry leader and to push for the finest product, so we constantly create new models, and we are innovative with our movements. The second thing is, I have to protect my client. For that, a Patek Philippe watch must keep its value.
What will become of all the people on the decade-long waiting lists?
We know, and our retailers know, that we will never be able to supply enough watches for all the people on the lists, because we don’t have them. It is as simple as that. That is why we never allow retailers to take a deposit.
Some retailers only get two Nautiluses a year, but they have 100 names on their waiting list. It is their own responsibility to explain it to the customer, but it’s not easy when you have someone who insists on getting on the list. You cannot only blame Patek Philippe for not delivering enough watches.
When did you decide to stop the Nautilus?
In 2019, at Baselworld, I said that I thought there were too many Nautiluses out there. Closing out the Ref. 5711 was on my mind then. And when I took the decision in 2019, we knew already what would come next.
Why did everyone learn about it from the run-out list?
We don’t retire our watches by public announcement. The Nautilus does not deserve a better treatment than another reference.
So what will happen now that the Nautilus is discontinued?
Stopping the Nautilus was an important decision, but we have a plan. The replacement to the Ref. 5711 will be quite major. It will be better than the Ref. 5711.
But I will not say today in what metal or if it will be in steel. It will be something else, very close, and logical.
It is like Christmas. You don’t want to know your gift before it’s Christmas, do you?
Which stores will be the first to receive that replacement?
It will be our own salons located in Geneva, Paris and London. It is not the perfect solution, and it will be a nightmare for them. That is my suggestion right now, but we will listen to our store managers.
Do you think that people will be disappointed, and some may not forgive you for ending the Nautilus?
Yes, people will be disappointed. I know I did not make a lot of friends in the past few weeks. All I can say is, I am sorry. But I hope in five or 10 years they will understand and forgive me.
We are doing this for our clients who already own a Patek Philippe and to protect our brand from becoming too commercial. I can continue to make this fantastic product, or sell 10 times more of them. But I am not working for numbers. I am protecting the company for the future, for my children.
This is an opportunity to teach a lesson to my kids, who are the first ones to say, “Dad, are you crazy?” They have to learn, just as my father taught me: When you have a fantastic brand like Patek, you have to protect the brand and not just one product.
In November, when the master Philippe Dufour announced a collaboration with the well-known retailer and collector Claude Sfeir, many in the watch world wondered what it actually meant. Would more Dufour watches suddenly become available? Would they be more expensive? Or less?
And photos of the two men on mountain bikes in the hilly pathways of Le Solliat, the village 40 miles north of Geneva where Mr. Dufour has his workshop, only heightened the curiosity.
Events of the last few weeks have begun to provide answers: The two men created a new limited-edition series of the Dufour Simplicity, achieved a benchmark auction price of more than $1.4 million for a prototype and have thousands of hopeful buyers scrambling to enter a lottery for chances to spend unspecified sums for 10 of those watches.
Mr. Dufour, generally with his pipe, and Claude Sfeir have been spending time together — in addition to their new business partnership.
“I am delighted with this new organization which will allow me to work serenely and develop beautiful projects for the future,” Mr. Dufour wrote in the November announcement, saying he was entrusting the business’s commercial side to his “longtime and trusted friend,” Mr. Sfeir. The men, who first met at auctions in the 1980s, became friends in 2014 when they both joined the jury of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
At 72, Mr. Dufour, whom some have called the “pope of watchmaking,” is an honored figure among his peers and the fans of independent watchmaking for his meticulous craft and mastery of traditional know-how. He has produced only about 230 watches since he started his business in 1992, and his waiting lists are lengthy.
As a result, his watches have been traded on the secondary market for multiples of their original prices — with Mr. Dufour seeing little of that money. It’s a situation that the new collaboration already has started to change.
A jeweler and gemologist by trade, Mr. Sfeir, 59, is himself considered a larger-than-life figure in the watch world. Known for his storied collection of Rolex, Patek Philippe and F.P. Journe timepieces, he also operates a boutique in Beirut, Lebanon, in partnership with the independent watchmaker François-Paul Journe.
Mr. Sfeir said he joined Mr. Dufour to help him capitalize on his decades of exceptional work. And while collaborations in the watch world have become common in recent years, this kind of meeting of creative and business minds is unusual.
“Philippe’s watches trade at top prices without him benefiting,” Mr. Sfeir said during a telephone interview from Beirut in late January. “He has not been getting the credit he deserves, so we decided to look ahead together not as business partners but as family.”
(A representative of Mr. Dufour said in mid-January that the watchmaker declined to be interviewed for this article, citing his heavy workload.)
Their first project is a limited-edition Simplicity 20th Anniversary series, each watch in a 37-millimeter case with a hinged caseback. The first seven will be in matte platinum with a blue dial; the next seven in white gold with a silver dial; and the last seven in rose gold with a brown dial. (The final watch is to be reserved for Mr. Dufour himself.)
Simplicity is a classic model that only tells time — it has none of the elaborate complications highlighted in many Swiss timepieces. Mr. Dufour has made no more than 215 of them, originally priced at 34,000 Swiss francs ($37,880 today), according to Mr. Sfeir.
The plan now — and the not-insignificant challenge for Mr. Dufour, whose only help is occasional assistance from his youngest daughter Daniela, a 19-year-old watchmaking student at the nearby École Technique de la Vallée de Joux — is to deliver 20 handmade watches in the next 24 months.
To measure, or perhaps, whet public appetite, Mr. Sfeir consigned a prototype numbered “00” to a Phillips auction in November in Geneva. The rose gold version had been estimated to sell for 200,000 to 400,000 francs — but in minutes soared to almost 1.37 million francs, the highest-ever price for a Simplicity.
“Everything about that watch was special: its 00/20 number, its dial, its caseback,” Mr. Sfeir said. “That is why it beat every lot, even the grand complications.” (An unusual Patek Philippe minute repeater sold for almost 1.2 million francs and a complicated F.P. Journe model went for 680,400 francs.)
“We did expect a high price for the Dufour,” said Alex Ghotbi, who is the head of watches in Continental Europe and Middle East at Phillips. “Collectors who own all the good vintage pieces are turning to modern independents like Dufour because their watches are rare, high quality and truly artisanal.”
The auction set a new public price benchmark for the Simplicity. Until the Phillips sale, the model’s price at auction had hovered at slightly less than $400,000, with the exception of a platinum piece that sold for 5.13 million Hong Kong dollars ($661,740) in October at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.
Dealers say they believe that prices for the Simplicity on the secondary market now will trend upward.
“In a market where there are few benchmarks, a public price tends to cement the value of a watch,” said Silas Walton, a watch collector and founder of A Collected Man, an online retailer of collectible watches based in London. “Once that happens, you will never be able to say the price is actually closer to $400,000, especially when there is a natural scarcity of supply with one man making the watches in his workshop.”
“His collectors and dealers have done well over the years, but Philippe himself has not benefited significantly from the organic appreciation of his own watches, materially speaking,” Mr. Walton said. “The association with Mr. Sfeir should restore some fairness in Dufour’s returns.”
In late November, Mr. Dufour announced in a news release that buyers had been selected for the first 10 anniversary watches. “We sold them at ‘reasonable prices,’” Mr. Sfeir said. “They were allocated to carefully chosen, true collectors who will not resell.”
The remaining 10, to be assigned via lottery, have become the focus of a fan frenzy. “I was getting 5,000 emails a day from buyers for the 10 watches,” Mr. Sfeir said. “The lottery will be transparent and supervised by a bailiff, in the interest of fairness and equal access.”
By late January, Mr. Sfeir said, 155,000 names had been registered, even though neither the date of the drawing nor the prices had been announced. (Interested buyers can register at [email protected].)
“One thing is certain, those who get one will hold on to it,” Mr. Ghotbi said. “If you sell your Simplicity, it’s unlikely you will get to buy another one.”
The next step for the Sfeir-Dufour partnership? Well, it won’t revolve around income.
A Simplicity is being specially designed for the Only Watch charity auction, scheduled in November, one of the watch world’s most prominent events. Held every two years, it funds research to fight Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a variation of the degenerative disease.
The donation will be Mr. Dufour’s first to the auction and, Mr. Sfeir said, “that Simplicity will be one of a kind.”
Watch brands are developing presentation boxes of recycled or green materials, a sign of their concern for sustainability.
Top, watch cases made from recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) fabrics from Adatte Design, a family-owned industrial design studio in Lausanne, Switzerland.
From Tiffany’s blue box to Cartier’s red one, product packaging can produce powerful brand associations and create a visual appeal that awakens desire for the objects inside.
When it comes to high-end watches, oversize boxes in glossy exotic woods or covered in leather are industry mainstays, less for their practical utility than to help build a sense of luxury and reinforce the perceived quality of the products they contain. In the resale market, they impart an added sense of authenticity for buyers, who assign more value to a watch that is sold with its original box and papers.
Now, with consumer attitudes in favor of eco-friendly products, some brands are thinking “outside the box” and making sustainability a central component of a business strategy in which the packaging itself is a selling point.
“Big glossy wooden boxes are so dated,” said Jeremia Adatte, a designer and administrator at Adatte Design, an industrial design studio in Lausanne, Switzerland. “Who wants to see trees cut down to make a watch box?”
Adatte, a family-owned business founded by Mr. Adatte’s father, Georges, has been producing packaging for clients in different industries since 1991. “Packaging is more important today than ever,” Mr. Adatte said. “Just look how popular unboxing videos are on social media.”
With 20 graphic artists and designers, the company designs and produces packaging, display accessories and corporate gifts made from recycled and nonrecycled material. A partner factory in Shanghai handles nearly all of Adatte’s production, with some sourcing and finishing done locally in Switzerland or in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic.
“Coming up with an original idea takes years of research and development, whether it is a new concept or a design to meet specs for a client,” Mr. Adatte said. “Our approach is innovation-focused, both in design and in sourcing new materials.”
Adatte’s website lists a number of watch brand clients, including Breitling, TAG Heuer and MB&F MAD Gallery, and the company said it had designed a variety of innovative packages, objects and display options for them. However, Mr. Adatte said he cannot be specific about projects, and most brands, when asked, would not even identify their suppliers.
“When you are creating a box with ‘poor’ materials, like cardboard or upcycled plastics, you need a strong design and that is attractive enough for an expensive watch,” Mr. Adatte said.
But designing sustainable packaging is not just about image. It can have a financial impact on the brand’s bottom line, especially when the solution is scalable.
“Today, brands look for innovative packaging because their customers care about waste,” Mr. Adatte said. “But beyond improving their image, lightweight, easily transportable boxes save brands money.”
Last month, Breitling introduced a foldable watch box made entirely of recycled PET, a plastic from bottles.
The side and front wings of the box fold up and fasten with snaps to create a 3-D shape. A travel pouch, also made of recycled PET, is included.
Breitling’s chief marketing officer, Tim Sayler, said that reducing the company’s carbon footprint and its shipping costs were winning arguments in its decision to adopt new packaging. Last month it introduced a foldable watch box made entirely of recycled PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic from bottles.
“Transportation is always an issue in sustainability,” Mr. Sayler said. “Our new box ships flat so it takes less space.”
A functional piece, its side and front wings fold up and fasten with snaps to create a 3-D shape. An inside pocket was designed to store the digital certificate of ownership that the brand recently introduced for its watches. A travel pouch, also made of recycled PET, is included.
The box may be recycled again, according to Breitling, if it is taken to a facility that handles recycled PET.
“This box,” Mr. Sayler said, “was designed by our team of in-house designers who work on everything from watches to collaterals to boutiques, with external input from partners who advised us on design and material sourcing." He would not identify the partners, but said the design process took 18 months.
Next year Breitling expects to use around 200,000 of the boxes, made by a German packaging supplier in China, for new watches. And, in an effort to reduce shipments, the boxes will be dispatched directly to boutiques or subsidiary markets rather than to Breitling’s Swiss headquarters, Mr. Sayler said.
Breitling is not the first brand to take this focus. In 2018, IWC Schaffhausen designed boxes that “contain 90 percent less plastic than previously, and 80 percent of the plastic remaining is recycled,” Franziska Gsell, IWC’s chief marketing officer and chairwoman of its Sustainability Committee, wrote in an email. The weight and volume of the boxes also were reduced by 30 percent.
Nepto, a Paris watch brand, said it used only recycled cardboard and paper for its boxes.
Why not abandon plastic altogether? The Paris-based watch brand Nepto uses only recycled cardboard and paper for its boxes, according to its founder, Vincent Ifrah, 33, who holds a degree in materials engineering. Nepto makes about 1,000 watches a year, with a starting price of 189.90 euros ($224).
“Our boxes are 100 percent recycled and recyclable, and they look good, so you will not want to throw them away,” Mr. Ifrah said.
“There is really no reason to use plastic to make watch boxes today since we get the same quality using cardboard,” he said. “Ours are made in France at a very low cost, proof that it is perfectly doable.”
Recycled cardboard also is the packaging material most widely used by Oris, a Swiss watch brand. And, according to Rolf Studer, its co-chief executive, the business will become CO2-neutral next year by managing travel, reducing energy usage and several other steps.
“When we started talking about sustainability 10 years ago, everyone would yawn,” Mr. Studer said from the factory in Hölstein, Switzerland. “Now everyone is talking about it.”
Oris, a Swiss watch brand, said it mostly used recycled cardboard in its boxes. The box for The Clean Ocean Limited Edition diver watch is made partly of marine algae.
In partnership with Pacific Garbage Screening, a nonprofit association building a floating platform designed to capture ocean plastics, Oris last year released the Clean Ocean Limited Edition diver watch in a series of 2,000 (priced at 2,200 Swiss francs, the equivalent of $2,400). The watch came with a case back decorated with a medallion of recycled PET and was sold in a box made partly of marine algae and covered with recycled paper originally used to filter algae in Venice’s Grand Canal. A travel pouch of recycled cotton is to be added next year.
“We want to bring attention to the fact that trash can have a second life even in a luxury product,” Mr. Studer said.
“Everything about owning luxury is changing,” he said. “Investing in luxury product only makes sense today when it is in something you love and will keep forever.”
With Swiss watch sales down, there are fewer calls for techniques like enameling and marquetry.
The master engraver Eddy Jaquet produced a series of eight one-of-a-kind watches for MB&F, each inspired by a Jules Verne novel. This watch is “From the Earth to the Moon.”
When Anita Porchet started out as an independent enameler in 1992, her specialty had all but disappeared from watchmaking, a near casualty of what the industry still calls the quartz crisis of the 1970s. As the popularity of inexpensive quartz watches pushed many Swiss watch brands near bankruptcy, it also undermined some of the traditional crafts tied to the industry
Three decades later, because of her talent and perseverance, Ms. Porchet has become one of the world’s premier enamelers, with more orders, she said, than she can fill. But facing the pandemic, she sees the profession once again at a tipping point — and unsure of its survival.
“Orders are being canceled or pushed back to next year or later,” Ms. Porchet said in a phone interview from her home in Corcelles-le-Jorat, Switzerland, in the canton of Vaud.
“My clients are all in a wait-and-see mode,” she said. “The impact of one or two order cancellations can be enormous on small workshops because they cannot hang on for very long without work.”
Ms. Porchet works from home aided by two assistants, a common arrangement for artisans who practice the traditional crafts commonly known as métiers d’art: enameling, marquetry, feather work, metal engraving and the like.
“I cannot afford an apprentice,” said Rose Saneuil, a French marquetry specialist based in Montrouge, a suburb of Paris. “It is hard enough making a living on my own from this type of work.”
Since Switzerland first went into lockdown in mid-March, global demand for high-end watches has collapsed. Nearly all the 2020 watch fairs, where so much of the industry’s business is done, were canceled, with some shifting to a virtual format because of global travel restrictions. And many distribution outlets around the world remain closed.
Swiss watch exports have plunged, down some 30 percent this year compared with last year, as reported in September by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Some watch brands are already laying off workers. In September, Ulysse Nardin and Girard Perregaux announced they were cutting about a quarter of their combined work force — around 100 jobs at the Kering Watches Manufacture. And more layoffs expected industrywide by year’s end.
“Many artisans are without work because brands cannot sell their watches,” Ms. Porchet said.
Decorative techniques in watchmaking date back centuries, but demand for métiers d’art watches has only seen a resurgence since 2000 — fueled, according to Ms. Porchet, mostly by Asian buyers who have a cultural appreciation for the work. Brands such as Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Ulysse Nardin, Hermès and Chanel, among others, have greatly contributed to the revival by developing exceptional craftsmanship in-house or by hiring independent artisans.
The Sparkling Blast by the watchmaker Ulysse Nardin, which is set with diamonds cut to look like shards of glass.
This year, as in the past, those brands presented a panoply of métiers d’art watches. Ulysse Nardin showed the Sparkling Blast watch set with diamonds cut geometrically to look like shards of glass. Vacheron Constantin unveiled in January a collection with enameled dials for the Lunar New Year.
Chanel’s Mademoiselle Privé Bouton line featured a Camée model, a secret watch with a profile of Coco Chanel hand-carved in agate on the dial cover. Piaget presented an array of métiers d’art timepieces, among them the Ecstatic Dance with a dial in a delicate marquetry of straw, mother-of-pearl, leather, parchment and wood, crafted by Ms. Saneuil.
“The orders I worked on during the lockdown were placed over a year ago,” Ms. Saneuil said. “I finished three dials for Piaget earlier this year. I am trying not to worry yet, but orders have slowed down.”
Several of the most sought-after craftspeople said that, in addition to fewer orders, they were seeing brands shifting from multipiece collections to very small collections or even just one-of-a-kind pieces — but requiring even more exceptional work.
“Our clients are now focusing exclusively on bespoke pieces and truly extraordinary product,” said Dick Steenman, a Geneva-based craftsman who works regularly for brands like Chanel, Chaumet and Van Cleef & Arpels.
“I think we are going to see an end to semi-industrial series in métiers d’art, and that is going to hurt many workshops with lesser qualifications,” Mr. Steenman said.
One of the watches in the Pegasus collection of Van’T Hoff.
In recent years Mr. Steenman, who also creates one-off timepieces under his own label, Van’T Hoff, reduced his staff by half — from 12 to six, retaining only highly skilled workers to create a niche specialty in engraving and miniature sculpture.
Also, he said, “a few clients are also asking for help in research and development, to come up with fresh ideas and innovative techniques.”
“Today, there is still demand for exceptional pieces,” Mr. Steenman said, “but buyers also want to know which artisan worked on their watch. They want to meet the craftsman, and learn how the watch was made. It is part of the ‘special services’ that high-end clients expect.”
Like Mr. Steenman, Ms. Porchet is focusing on more sophisticated and often more complex projects. She recently completed an enameled case back for a pocket watch that a brand (which she declined to identify) had ordered for a private client, and a small series of enameled dials for the Arceau Aaaaargh! wristwatch, commissioned by Hermès.
“Wealthy collectors will always buy unique or custom-made pieces, even in periods of crisis,” Ms. Porchet said.
The independent brand MB&F also has ventured into métiers d’art in a rare collaboration with a master engraver, Eddy Jaquet, on a series of eight one-of-a kind Legacy Machine watches. Each of the LM Split Escapement x Eddy Jaquet, introduced in September, was inspired by a different Jules Verne novel.
“During uncertain times, people still buy intrinsically valuable products,” said Charris Yadigaroglou, head of communication for MB&F from Geneva.
“Eddy has been engraving inscriptions for us for 10 years,” Mr. Yadigaroglou said. “Three years ago, we noticed that he had very little work despite his immense talent. So we asked him to design and engrave the dials for this series.”
MB&F said all eight watches — each priced at 148,000 Swiss francs ($161,900) — were presold on Zoom calls with retailers, even before Mr. Jaquet had completed the last three dials.
“I am grateful for this project because, without it, I would not have much work the rest of this year,” Mr. Jaquet said from his atelier in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. “I go from being overly busy to being under-worked very quickly.”
And at least one entrepreneur has seized on the moment as an opportunity.
The XRby Rose Saneuil has a quetzal in a marquetry of wood and leather on its dial. “I am trying not to worry yet, but orders have slowed down,”Ms. Saneuil, a French marquetry specialist, said.
Last month Xavier Rousset, a former dial maker, introduced XRby, a new brand that plans to produce métiers d’art mechanical watches in collaboration with a single artisan, but only after payment is made. Prospective buyers will be able to view high-definition computer-generated renditions of a proposed watch design on the XR website, and then place orders.
“The watch industry is at a turning point today,” Mr. Rousset said from Besançon, a small town near the Swiss border that is known as France’s watch capital. “The current crisis and competition from connected watches will kill off much of the quartz watch industry. But there will always be demand for mechanical watches with beautiful, decorative workmanship.”
His first model, the XRby Rose Saneuil, features a brightly colored quetzal in a marquetry of wood and leather on its dial. It is priced at 33,000 euros, or $38,670.
“These are know-hows that people care about and must be preserved,” Mr. Rousset said. “We are doing just that by putting the craftsman back at the heart of watchmaking.”
A new app will use high-resolution photographs to authenticate timepieces.
A rendering of the Origyn app, designed to authenticate watches through a system similar to facial recognition. “The biometrics of the watch become its own certificate of authenticity,” said Vincent Perriard, a co-founder of Origyn.
There was a time not all that long ago when bank tellers would record transactions by writing in clients’ passbooks. Technology, of course, has revolutionized all that — and more.
But, as the world has gone paperless, the authentication of a watch is still largely done in the traditional way: producing the original box and the paperwork from the first sale.
So even though hundreds of millions of watches are in circulation, their authenticity, provenance and repair or resale history generally are established with actual paper trails. Lose that receipt, authenticity certificate or warranty booklet and the value of the watch may decrease, even though such documents can be subject to tampering, error or forgery.
To lessen the uncertainties, some watch brands have been developing ways to establish the identity of their watches by relying on blockchain, the database technology used for tamper-proof storage of digital information that is accessible to all.
Breitling, for example, announced that its new watches sold after Oct. 13 would come, in addition to the “box and papers,” with a digital passport to allow owners to prove authenticity and ownership. Vacheron Constantin introduced its own digital certification process in May 2019.
Buy a Vacheron Constantin watch and you are invited to scan a QR code to get a digital certificate for your timepiece.
And earlier this year, the founders of the online marketplace Tradeewatches debuted Watch Certificate, a steel card with a QR code that links a watch to its digital certificate on the blockchain.
But in September, Origyn, a nonprofit foundation based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, announced that it was taking data digitalization a step further.
“Origyn offers a digital certification system that allows any user to authenticate any luxury product immediately with a high-resolution photo taken with a smartphone,” said Vincent Perriard, a co-founder of Origyn and former chief executive of the watch brand HYT. The company plans to introduce the Origyn app in mid-2021.
“The biometrics of the watch become its own certificate of authenticity,” Mr. Perriard said.
The app, which he called a kind of Shazam for watches, would eliminate the use of markings like an engraved inscription or documents like a brand certificate in establishing authentications, the company said.
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“Three elements needed to come together to make this technology possible: artificial intelligence, smartphones and the high-resolution camera,” Mr. Perriard said. “It’s serendipity that we have all three.”
Origyn’s algorithm, according to a company statement, uses artificial intelligence with machine learning techniques to analyze millions of infinitely small points of reference captured in high-resolution images.
In addition to the photo analysis, other information would be added to the watch’s history and kept on blockchain.
When a customer buys the watch, Mr. Perriard said, “the purchaser’s information is entered by the brand using its own customized app, ‘powered by Origyn.’
At each future transaction, the owner has a code to add a new owner’s name or any other data like an insurance policy.”
“The biometrics of the watch become its own certificate of authenticity,” Mr. Perriard said.
The app, which he called a kind of Shazam for watches, would eliminate the use of markings like an engraved inscription or documents like a brand certificate in establishing authentications, the company said.
ON TECH WITH SHIRA OVIDE: Your guide to how technology is transforming our lives — in the time of coronavirus and beyond.
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“Three elements needed to come together to make this technology possible: artificial intelligence, smartphones and the high-resolution camera,” Mr. Perriard said. “It’s serendipity that we have all three.”
Origyn’s algorithm, according to a company statement, uses artificial intelligence with machine learning techniques to analyze millions of infinitely small points of reference captured in high-resolution images.
In addition to the photo analysis, other information would be added to the watch’s history and kept on blockchain.
When a customer buys the watch, Mr. Perriard said, “the purchaser’s information is entered by the brand using its own customized app, ‘powered by Origyn.’
At each future transaction, the owner has a code to add a new owner’s name or any other data like an insurance policy.”
Breitling said new watches sold after Oct. 13 would come with a digital passport to prove authenticity and ownership.
(The bank teller anecdote at the beginning of this article was part of Mr. Schwartz’s TED Talk in 2016 on blockchain innovation.)
Experts said that digitalized certification would provide the watch industry with new tools to combat counterfeiting.
“A fake is not just a $50 watch you buy in Bangkok or on Canal Street,” said Pierre-Antoine Racine, a former head of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry’s task force against counterfeiting. He is the founder of Griffes Consulting, a Geneva-based intellectual property specialist that was retained to register Origyn’s name and patent.
“It is also the sophisticated ‘super fakes’ that are much harder to detect,” Mr. Racine said.
“With Origyn’s app, anyone can see if someone is wearing a fake watch,” he said. “It will help the fight by adding social pressure.”
The primary attraction of Origyn’s app, Mr. Perriard said, is that it is technologically advanced yet easy to use.
For their digital certifications, Breitling and Vacheron Constantin worked with Arianee, a technology consortium based in Paris, relying on what the consortium calls the “universal open-source protocol” for creating “digital identities.” It requires an owner to use a smartphone to scan an electronic card that comes with a new watch, triggering the download of an encrypted digital wallet that stores information about the watch, including its serial number and warranty information.
“Breitling moved at incredible speed to implement its system,” said Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel, founder and chief executive of Arianee. “In 2021, we expect to see a huge acceleration with other brands launching our technology.” Arianee lists Richemont (which owns brands like Cartier and Piaget) and watchmakers including Audemars Piguet, MB&F, Manufacture Royale, Roger Dubuis and March Lab among its consortium members.
However, Mr. Perriard said, “all the other solutions out there require something outside the watch to work, like scanning a card. We just use the watch itself.”
Origyn now needs brands and large resellers to adopt the app, which it says will be provided free. It does anticipate there will be fees for owners who want to get their pre-owned watches photographed and into the system — but, as a nonprofit, Origyn intends to use any money to improve its technology, while brands may use their share for research and development or other costs.
Mr. Perriard said he would spend the next few months introducing its technology across the industry so the app could be customized to meet brands’ specific requirements.
“Our goal right now is to find ways to satisfy the brands and the users,” Mr. Perriard said. “Our technology is ingenious — we just need time to show everyone that it works.”
PARIS — The conceptual artist Kapwani Kiwanga, whose latest exhibition here recreates elaborate floral arrangements from archival photographs to capture a moment in time, was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp on Monday in a celebration that also marked the 20th anniversary of the prize.
The award, viewed as France’s answer to Britain’s Turner Prize, is named after one of France’s most influential 20th-century artists and is given to an artist born or working in France. Ms. Kiwanga, a native of Canada, works in Paris.
The winner was announced by Bernard Blistène, director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center.
“At a time of rising nationalism around the world, it is important to emphasize that this is not a ‘nationalistic’ prize, but the recognition of an international artist who is part of the French art scene,” said Mr. Blistène, who also presides over the seven-person jury. Members include Gitte Orskou, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Marie-Cécile Zinsou, president of the Zinsou Foundation in Benin, in West Africa.
The award ceremony at the museum went ahead despite the pandemic that forced the cancellation of the annual International Contemporary Art Fair, or FIAC. The fair, which would have opened on Thursday, is usually the focal point of a buoyant week of art-filled events in the French capital. This year, the ceremony was held against a background of global travel restrictions compounded by a local nighttime curfew in place in Paris.
“It isn’t because we are going through a terrible period that this public institution should not stand for hope for the future,” Mr. Blistène said.
With the prize Ms. Kiwanga was awarded 35,000 euros (about $41,000). The other nominees were Alice Anderson, Hicham Berrada and Enrique Ramírez, selected by a committee of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, a group of about 400 art collectors that created the prize.
The appropriation of history is the subject of “Flowers for Africa,” a series of installations by Ms. Kiwanga that consist of elaborately arranged fresh flowers, suspended as a garland from the ceiling or set in bouquets on pedestals. Each is a “reconstruction” of a floral arrangement the artist has gleaned from an archival photograph of an official ceremony marking the independence of an African country.
“The flowers wilt and dry over time and must be replaced according to a protocol,” said Ms. Kiwanga, who is 42. “They capture a moment in history.”
Sophie Duplaix, the chief curator at the Pompidou Center, where works by the nominees will be displayed through early January, said that “all four artists have touched on the notion of time and its impact on the individual and society.”
“That common thread helped us bring harmony to a show that we hope will resonate with the public, especially in a period when we are all reconsidering our own relationship with time,” she said.
In “Flowers for Africa,” Ms. Kiwanga examines that connection by confronting history and botany. History is retold through the life cycle of flowers left to wilt for the duration of the exhibition. Her reconstruction of ceremonial bouquets underscores the shortcomings of capturing history.
“The project was born out of my own frustration at looking at images that seemed always to depict political leaders present at independence ceremonies,” she said. “I wanted to look beyond those central figures and focus on the flower arrangements, which were witnesses on the sidelines of those historical events.”
After studying anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, Ms. Kiwanga attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
This year is also the 20th anniversary of the Duchamp prize, and to mark this milestone, a six-month exhibition at the museum honors previous winners.
“I believe in French art for its spirit, its elegance and its joie de vivre,” said Gilles Fuchs, a collector and president of the association.
“This prize recognizes an artist whose innovative practice is representative of a generation and reflects the creativity of the French art scene,” he added. “The 20th-anniversary show is evidence of our continued support of the artists.”
Mr. Blistène said the award “is not driven by ‘market’ interests.” He added that the association collectors “are not motivated by commercial interests nor by mundane or ‘domestic’ considerations like whether they can hang the art in their living rooms.”
Among the other nominees, Mr. Berrada’s artistic practice sits at the junction of science and nature. His installation, “Présage, SiO2,” is a 12-minute video showing the reaction that occurs when he pours silicon dioxide, a component used in making concrete, to activate a controlled chemical reaction in a glass tank filled with a mixture of acid and water. A mesmerizing landscape of moving shapes is captured in the video, projected onto a large screen. Mr. Berrada, 34, a native of Morocco, lives and works in Paris and Roubaix, in northern France.
The French-born Alice Anderson, 47, reflects on memory in a presentation made up of drawings, dance movements and totemic sculptures constructed from “recorded” everyday objects — like a computer mouse or a mobile phone — wrapped in copper thread, that connect man to technology.
“Technology is driving a change of civilization,” Ms. Anderson said. “These objects are mummified to be preserved.”
On a wall in the space dedicated to Mr. Ramírez, 41, a Chilean multimedia artist who lives and works in Paris and Santiago, are the words: “The future always repeats itself inseparable from the past.” The sentiment ties together several pieces that touch on issues of migration and history.
At the center, a video depicts a man entangled in the twisted fabric of a sail floating in the sea, in what could be interpreted as either a slow struggle for survival or a metaphor for a return to the fetal state inside a womb.
“The sea and the sail evoke both freedom and failure,” Mr. Ramírez said. “My work is less about politics and more about poetry.”
Mr. Fuchs said the ADIAF (it is referred to with its French abbreviation) was founded in 1994 to promote the nation’s art. At the time, French artists were at a low point, their work was being purchased only by the state, and there were few private French art collections.
“Matisse had not been dead very long, yet the French art scene was completed discredited to the point that some even referred to Marcel Duchamp as an American painter,” Mr. Fuchs said.
“But thanks to the support of the Centre Pompidou from Day 1 and our own efforts, this prize has gained the prestige it has today,” he said.
The prize is less a launchpad for young artists than a spotlight on a body of work by more established names like Kader Attia, the 2016 winner, who went on to receive both the Joan Miró Prize and the Yanghyun Prize the next year.
For many past winners, the prize has been a genuine boost to their careers, particularly thanks to the three-month show at the Pompidou.
“All prizes and encouragements are welcome in the life of an artist,” Thomas Hirschhorn, a Swiss artist who was awarded the first prize, wrote in a statement to the French press ahead of this year’s announcement.
“As an artist, I need my work to be shown, talked about and critiqued,” he wrote. “What is concrete about this prize and what really mattered to me were the prize money, the funding I received from ADIAF for a new piece, and my show at the Centre Pompidou.”
Laurent Grasso, a French multimedia artist who won in 2008, noted the attention the prize brought him. “Some 45,000 visitors came to my show at the museum,” he said. “This prize generates a lot of positive energy around the work of an artist.”
Upstairs, in the main galleries of the museum, works by all 19 past winners are displayed among pieces from the museum’s permanent collections.
“The dialogue with our historical pieces shows how more recent works fit into an ongoing artistic tradition,” said Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, the curator of the show.
“Some people consider contemporary artists to be engaged in a perpetual reinvention of art,” Mr. Liucci-Goutnikov said. “But this show demonstrates that art is a heritage being constantly renewed.”
While the Salzburg Festival has been forced to limit its offerings in a year marred by the global pandemic, art lovers in town are in for a treat.
In a season unlike any other, a smaller crowd is being accommodated at the events and performances, and the gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac hopes many of them will come to his show of new works by the celebrated German artist Anselm Kiefer.
The event, which runs through Oct. 3, features 18 monumental paintings and an installation, a sculptural piece encased in glass. All were produced in Barjac, a town in southern France where Mr. Kiefer lives part time.
Mr. Ropac, an opera fan and Austrian native, said the Salzburg gallery, which opened in 1983, was active all year round but even more so during the summer. “The town becomes a cultural hub, so bustling you can feel it in the air.”
This year, the pandemic forced the gallery to close on March 14; it reopened June 2. The public will be allowed inside the gallery’s building, the Villa Kast, for the show, which can also be viewed online.
In this series, Mr. Kiefer depicts the rural landscape in Barjac, through an immersive experience of its blades of grass and flowers, a close-up of nature. “The grass, the entire vegetation was so dried out that the light yellow stalks and the withered thistles made for a whole variety of ocher and yellow shades which delighted me; which, in their beauty on the verge of decay, reminded me of the grim reaper, Eros and Thanatos,” Mr. Kiefer wrote in a statement issued by the gallery.
The new works, in the artist’s signature style of densely painted surfaces bursting with color, texture and the occasional object, are dedicated to the medieval troubadour Walther von der Vogelweide, a familiar reference in Mr. Kiefer’s oeuvre since the 1970s. His poems are still taught to German-speaking schoolchildren.
“Kiefer is greatly influenced by literature,” Mr. Ropac said. “His work is often reduced to references to history, but the life that Kiefer depicts is so much richer than that.”
Born in Germany in March 1945, two months before Germany’s surrender to Allied forces, Mr. Kiefer has a powerful voice that often echoes the burden of his generation as it confronts modern German history.
Though these works are not as melancholy as his other rural landscapes — like his sunflower series from the 1990s — a sense of decline emanates from his flowering meadows, particularly where a (real) trenchant sickle juts out of the canvas.
“Kiefer has returned to the landscape before harvest,” Mr. Ropac said. “The sickle evokes the harvest, but also death, labor or abundance, all of which could be viewed as political references.”
“This is a lyrical series in a German ‘romantic’ genre,” he said. “It is a very beautiful series, but in a deeper, more sophisticated sense of beauty.”
The exhibition is typical of Mr. Ropac’s summer activities. Based in Paris, he spends every August in Salzburg, organizing events at the gallery and working with the festival.
He has served on the board of the Friends of the Salzburg Festival, the event’s main sponsor, and has lent or donated art for shows produced in tandem with festival organizers.
“Last year, we installed a Joseph Beuys piece at the Festspielhaus, the festival’s main venue,” he said. “Some years ago, we worked with Robert Longo when he was invited to design stage sets for Mozart’s ‘Lucio Silla.’”
This year, Mr. Ropac has pledged to donate 5,000 euros (about $5,880) each to 20 Salzburg-based artists who have experienced financial hardship because of the pandemic.
“We are launching a broad program of solidarity to benefit young artists at our Pantin gallery in the fall,” Mr. Ropac said, referring to his space in a suburb of Paris. “On a smaller scale here, we are offering financial support to Salzburg artists.”
A Swiss watch is much more than the sum of its parts, but when the supply chain for its hundreds and sometimes thousands of components is disrupted, each small piece can take on an outsize importance.
That was what happened during the coronavirus lockdowns, both in Switzerland and, halfway around the globe, in China. And now that manufacturing is resuming, Swiss watchmakers are struggling to get parts — even as they and their suppliers worry about slumping sales.
Many Swiss brands use only parts made in Switzerland, sometimes in the same village as the brand factory. But it is an open secret in the watch industry that others purchase bracelets, movements, cases, crowns or hands from suppliers, primarily in China.
“Since the 1970s, many in the Swiss watch industry have looked to Asia to avoid higher Swiss labor costs,” said Oliver Müller, founder and managing director of LuxeConsult based in Geneva. “Outsourcing to Asia has long helped brands to maintain their profit margins.”
In 2017, Switzerland revised a legal standard that, in the case of watch exports, allowed timepieces to carry the “Swiss-Made” label as long as at least 60 percent of their value came from Switzerland, their movements were made in the country and they were assembled there.
Watchmakers began having supply problems as the new coronavirus was recognized in China in January. Like other businesses, watch factories and parts makers shut down in Shenzhen, the watchmaking heart of China, a city of about 13 million in Guangdong Province, just north of Hong Kong.
“Factories in Shenzhen are typically small companies that tend to be run by private entrepreneurs,” said Thomas Gatley, a corporate analyst at the research firm Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing.
“They closed right after the Chinese New Year holiday in late January, and some employees did not return to work after the normal holiday period,” he added. “Most factories reopened slowly after two to three weeks, sometime in March.”
Even as the Chinese factories were resuming work, production facilities in Switzerland were closing as the virus spread to Europe and retail outlets shut down around the world.
“Chinese factories took a big hit to cash flow after they reopened because customer orders had been delayed or canceled in the majority of Chinese export-related sectors,” Mr. Gatley said.
The Shenzhen companies “only have about two to three months of cash on hand to pay salaries and no access to banking channels,” he said. “After that, they will go under. The Chinese government has offered a ‘tax holiday’ and delayed payment of social security, fees and taxes to March 2021. It is a very helpful policy, but the question of how long the factories can hang on depends on how much cash they have on hand.”
Some are not operating at all. For example, a watch-case maker in Dongguan, another industrial city in Guangdong Province, closed in March for three months when Fossil Group, its largest client, canceled its order, according to a story in the Global Times, an English-language newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
The threat of factory closures — and the resulting decline in parts availability and lost expertise — could have ripple effects in Swiss watch manufacturing, particularly for watches priced at less than 1,000 Swiss francs ($1,040) because they so often use Chinese-made parts.
“China is the biggest source of horological imports into Switzerland,” said Jean-Daniel Pasche, president of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. The organization, which monitors exports monthly to track industry growth, also tallies horological imports on a semiannual basis.
According to the 2019 federation figures, the most current statistics available, Switzerland watchmakers imported a total of 3.78 billion Swiss francs ($3.95 billion) worth of watches and components from sources worldwide. Of that amount, China and Hong Kong’s shares totaled 1.09 billion francs.
Based on information from the Swiss Federal Customs Administration, Mr. Müller said, those 2019 imports included 655 million francs worth of watch components (the rest were assembled watches).
But that was 2019.
The value of horological imports in the first quarter of 2020 dropped 35 percent, to 372 million francs from 572 million francs in the same period last year, Mr. Müller said, using data provided by the customs administration.
Suppliers and watchmakers alike hope things will improve in the second quarter: Switzerland began a phased reopening of businesses, including watch factories, in mid-May.
But companies like Code41, a watchmaker based in Lausanne, Switzerland, are continuing to experience delays in parts shipments.
“We now have a one-month delay in production of some models due to Chinese factory closures in January,” said Amir Sfez, the company’s chief operating officer.
Even brands that rely exclusively on Swiss parts are experiencing similar problems, but lack of demand — from wary shoppers to the collapse of global tourism and its related sales — may make the issue all but moot.
“When some of the big brands shut their production facilities, many of our Swiss suppliers were forced to close, too,” said Edouard Meylan, chief executive of H. Moser & Cie. “We have had to reduce our own capacity.”
“Initially, the view among brands was that we wouldn’t be able to produce because we couldn’t get parts,” he added. “Then we realized that even if we were able to produce, we couldn’t sell our watches.”
In April, the Swiss bank Vontobel estimated that the country’s watch exports would decline by 25 percent this year. That would be a larger fall than the 22 percent drop in the 2009 financial crisis or the 15 percent decline seen in the Quartz Crisis of 1975, when battery-powered watches threatened Swiss mechanical watchmaking.
“Swiss watchmaking will rebound again, but it will be slow,” Mr. Pasche said. “Its recovery will depend on consumers and whether they will want to buy watches again.”
So, could one result of Covid-19 be the emergence of a local, more efficient supply chain?
François-Henry Bennahmias, chief executive of Audemars Piguet, has long denounced the risks of outsourcing.
“Without its Swiss suppliers, Swiss watchmaking is nothing,” Mr. Bennahmias said. “I have pride in our know-how, and when I hear that some brands produce elsewhere to shave off a few francs on each piece, I want to scream.”
But brands in the low- to midrange price sector would find it difficult to maintain both volume and cost controls in Switzerland. “If a brand must pay a local supplier 400 francs for a part that costs 40 in China, that brand is dead in that price segment,” Mr. Müller said.
Still, to keep labor costs low, some production facilities are looking at increased robotization while some are moving from Switzerland to Eastern Europe, which has cheaper labor and a tradition of craftsmanship. “One part producer is already set up in Ukraine, but Poland, Slovenia or Romania are also viable options,” Mr. Müller said.
