HOLDING THE HIGH GROUND

Chanel's 2024 collection represents a rare moment where haute couture and haute horlogerie coexist perfectly.

- DANIEL GOH

There was once a time when watches were items of necessity. Anyone and everyone who wanted to conveniently keep track of the unyielding flow of time would need a watch, be it in the pocket or on the wrist. Therefore, with the watch as a tool, people didn’t quite pay too much attention as to how it was made, so as long as the timekeeper was precise and, more importantly, reliable. This basically explains how the quartz era and its more efficient timekeepers nearly decimated the mechanical watch industry, but that is a story for another time. In the current era of watchmaking, however, a timepiece is no longer simply just a tool for keeping track of time (this job has been relegated to the smartphone) but rather a luxury purchase, an item that speaks to emotional appeal instead of practical ones.

This is why the modern watch enthusiast pays far more attention to every detail of a watch. It is no longer just about precision and reliability. The provenance of a brand, its ethos and even its manufacturing processes all play a role in converting a customer when it comes to serious watches. Due to this shift, many fashion brands, when diversifying their portfolio into the watchmaking market, decided the best way to capture the hearts and minds of watch enthusiasts was to subtly steer their watches away from their fashion elements to instead highlight more “watchmaking” inspired collections.

Chanel for example, is a house that since 1910 has been intrinsically linked with the fashion industry, first as a designer of hats and a few years later as a house of couture. And yet, the first “serious” watch they made, the iconic J12, was inspired and named after a class of racing yachts, and even built with ceramic, a material that was considered futuristic when it was launched in 1999.