Extravagant watch designs come in every style imaginable and are some of the most visually stunning timepieces to have ever been created. Some watch brands have used skills to create what we like to term ‘Horological Art‘ where a fine timepiece becomes a visual work of art worn on the wrist.
Discover our selection of some of the world’s most extravagant watch designs!
For the past decade, Harry Winston has been pushing both technical and aesthetic boundaries with the Histoire de Tourbillon collection, which concludes with the Histoire de Tourbillon 10, the tenth and final chapter in the story. The watch design is perfectly symmetrical and surprisingly clean – the sculptural pair of sloping bridges supporting the case mount a dial crafted from a single piece of sapphire.
The functional becomes beautiful in the Dior Grand Bal Plume Wild, a family of watches which celebrate, rather than conceal, the remarkable technology at their heart. The oscillating weight of the movement becomes the graceful swirl of a ball gown; here ensconced in black feathers, it creates a pleasing textural jarring against a veined blue stone.
The new Grip by Gucci looks set to enter the brand’s roster of classic pieces, which succinctly capture the zeitgeist. A restrained, retro aesthetic and functional watch design ticks here nod fondly to Gérald Genta’s famed brand of the luxury sports watch. It’s the vintage chic marriage of burgundy calfskin and gleaming yellow gold that makes this the one for us.
MB&F’s legendary brand of avant-garde cool is thankfully still very much evident in its very first timepiece for women. The Legacy Machine FlyingT refuses to compromise on a technicality and is the latest of creator Maximilian Büsser’s three-dimensional mechanical sculptures, featuring an eponymous 60-second flying tourbillon which hovers enigmatically over a central pillar. The result may be eye-catching, but telling the time itself is surprisingly intimate thanks to a clever angled elegant sub-dial that only the wearer can see.
Hublot’s collaboration with Marc Ferrero is the latest in a long line of prolific partnerships. The Hublot Big Bang One Click Marc Ferrero depicts one of the artist’s most renowned works, ‘Lipstick’, on the dial, circled in spinels or topazes. Ferrero is renowned for amalgamating different graphic styles, and this collaboration sees precious gems fused with functional technology.
The Van Cleef & Arpels emblem of luck translates seamlessly into other forms, too, as the cocktail-style ‘Sweet Alhambra’ watch design shows. By fitting the crown under the case, the clover silhouette remains graphically pure. This guilloché dial design, with layer upon layer of gold detailing, leads us to hope that our luck just might be about to turn.
