You would think they’d make strange bedfellows: fashion – fleeting and changeable; watches – methodical and rational.
Yet since couture houses seized hold of fine jewellery in the 1980s, the two worlds have come together to create a new genre of fashion-fuelled, design-driven, often fantastical women’s watches.
Fashion has brought femininity, artistry and emotion to the previously technically oriented and deeply traditional world of watchmaking.
Women’s timepieces tended to be scaled-down versions of men’s watches, perhaps with a token sprinkling of diamonds, and designs were essentially classic and unchanging.
Fashion houses transformed the watch into an ever-evolving object of desire with modern relevance, succeeding in fusing haute couture and haute horlogerie with spectacular results.
Chanel introduced storytelling and a couture spirit with its first aptly named Première watch, launched in 1987 under the direction of Jacques Helleu.
Designed expressly for women, Première reflected Chanel with its case shaped like the stopper of No5 perfume, and its chain bracelet threaded with leather that mimicked the strap of the Chanel handbag.
At the time, it was an anomaly in the watch world, explains Marianne Etchebarne, Chanel’s global head of watches and fine jewellery marketing. “From the start, we wanted to enable women to express their style and personality, to complete their look with their watches.”
Then, in 2000, came Chanel’s game-changing J12, also designed by Jacques Helleu, a sporty, slightly masculine design made of shiny hi-tech ceramic, at first in black and a few years later in white, expressing Mademoiselle’s “absolutes”. “It is instantly recognisable as Chanel, very practical, intended for day-to-night wear, adapted to modern life,” says Etchebarne. For 2021, the J12 will come dressed in a rainbow of coloured sapphires.
In 2001, three years after Victoire de Castellane joined Dior as creative director of the new Dior fine jewellery collection, the mighty maison pivoted its attention to watches, setting up its own manufacturing facility in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the centre of Swiss watchmaking.
De Castellane’s La D de Dior launched in 2003, inspired by her grandfather’s classic watch, with a 1970s-flavoured hardstone dial and a provocative hint of masculinity that drew attention to the sensuality of the female wrist. The huge success of La D has bred an ongoing panoply of models, from the Satine, with its silky mesh bracelet, to the newest bejewelled La D de Dior Précieuse à Secret Rose Dior with a lavishly gem-set rose covering the dial.
The strikingly modernist Gem Dior collection, de Castellane’s first new watch since 2003, she describes as “abstract-organic, an organised disruption”, inspired, she adds by the natural formations of rough tourmaline.
The open cuff watch has an off-centre octagonal dial, and on the multi-gem version, the bracelet is composed of jumbled, jostling slices of lapis lazuli, pink opal, tiger’s eye and carnelian.