Day One at Watches and Wonders 2026

Instead of talking about all the press release details that everyone got their hands on at 0:01 Geneva Time on Tuesday morning, let’s look at how Watches and Wonders Geneva 2026 felt, how the show felt, and how the watches feel.

Once the doors opened, it instantly felt busy with a lot of excitement in the air, largely because people from all over the world, who work within this relatively small environment, come together. You start seeing friends and colleagues as we all funnel into one area, and you actually don’t talk about watches. You talk about your kids, your family, and what your flight was like (we were all topsy-turvy with everything from flight rescheduling and Lufthansa’s sequential strikes). Some arrived early to do manufacture tours before the show, while others will tour them afterwards. I am usually asked to do manufacturer visits in between the days of the show, but I’ve stopped doing that because it just takes too much time away from the main fair. I’ll be visiting manufacturers and bringing some people to the Patek Philippe Museum, the rare handicrafts exhibits and the like after the show.

Walking in, you’re used to things like the huge Rolex booth—and when I say booth, we’re talking about a two- to three-story building that looks like a huge bank vault. Beside it is the Patek Philippe booth with its curved white, almost luminescent, structure, with Mr. Stern’s office on the second floor so he sees everybody who walks up and down. These are things we’re used to; and those facilities, including those by Chopard and Tudor, are somewhat enclosed. When they open up on the public days this weekend, guests can walk through certain areas to see the exhibits.

Then we look at other brands who use similar structures as opposed to building their own, so they focus on getting visual impact in the inside. When you turn the corner, for example, to see Panerai or IWC or Grand Seiko or Hermès, you suddenly see stunning interiors and installations. At Panerai, you see huge bubbling vats of liquid that partly look oceanographic and partly science fiction. IWC feels like it’s shuttling you through cutting-edge space travel with wide open spaces. Grand Seiko has a beautiful, almost sculptural installation where, as you walk in or go anywhere near it, you see small glowing globes that act in a circle moving up and down.

Hermès has an artist-designed setup inspired from the clockwork mechanisms used in theater backdrops, but you see it all, exposed, in front of you: weights and ropes pulling screens of different kinds up and down. Tag Heuer has two wonderful race cars, one from Formula One and one with one of the old Gulf livery sports cars. Vacheron Constantin makes you look up because they’ve put amazing mural work on their ceiling. Jaeger-LeCoultre always does something interesting in the center of their booth, but surrounds that with different smaller areas where the team explains the different kinds of crafts that the house applies to their watches.

When someone asked me if I still get excited going to Watches and Wonders, I said, “Yeah, because I can still walk around a corner and see something amazing.”

Then, of course, there are the watches. When I see all the assessments being made right now, I can clearly tell they were all written from press kits, before the event happened. Very few people get their hands on the watches, and they’re all trying to make an impact that, in today’s world, is meant to get your attention and hit an algorithm. Everyone you see on social media, for example, is standing in front of Rolex because that gets the most attention and the most hits. And articles tend to say the same thing, which is that the watch houses are playing safe, and that there are no groundbreaking innovations.

But the thing is, there are groundbreaking innovations; they’re just not looking at them. Patek Philippe made its first ever sunrise, sunset complication visible on a wristwatch, and because it chose to have a particular date indication, had to slightly realign the dates so everything was in balance. Grand Seiko just made arguably the most well finished, most accurate, technically capable 300 meter dive watch ever, and this at a time when everyone is complaining that dive watches are all trying to look like Rolex Submariners. Credor, new to the show, presented pieces whose text on the dial is hand painted, then showered with platinum dust, lacquered, then finished again. Parmigiani has taken their hidden complications and vision of private luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary even further by creating a monopusher chronograph that, when activated, operates with five hands on a single column, but is also just a beautifully clean watch. 

And this has just been a slow day one.