FAIRLY FANTASTIC

The LVMH Watch Week comes to Singapore for the first time, giving us a preview of watchmaking directions in 2023

- ASHOK SOMAN

Novelty is the lifeblood of the trade, without which, this magazine would not exist. That is no exaggeration, although there is certainly no danger that watch brands would ever do away with the practice of showing new watches every year. Some brands do flirt with the idea of changing up their release schedules and such, but none would stay their hands for even a year. The best example of this was in 2020, when the world fully expected that no new watches would be released. The extraordinary circumstances of that benighted year made the aforementioned lack of new watches seem reasonable, and the paucity of novelties did not make a big dent in the long run.

However, even that year, the major players all eventually went ahead and debuted new watches, which may have been taken as a sign that the power of novelty is both real and really needed. Whatever the case may be, watch reveals continued throughout 2020 and a number of banner years followed. 

As we reported last year, when covering the first physical Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva, absolutely no one was upset about the return of annual novelty shows carried out in person. Digital shows are convenient, and all that jazz, but nothing beats touching and feeling new watches in person – not an uncontested point of view, as it turns out but we will come back to that. New watches and the physical watch fair experience are exactly what we shall go on about for a number of pages, because Singapore was lucky enough to host the recently concluded LVMH Watch Week. While we will not cover everything here, do look out for some key pieces from TAG Heuer, Zenith, Bulgari and Hublot. And on that last bit, we have given Hublot its own segment right after this brief overview. With this preamble out of the way, we can get on with the show.