The Best of the Best From Watches & Wonders

This was always going to be a bit of a year of upheaval for the Swiss watchmaking industry as brands questioned the purpose of global shows and struggled to find new ways to reach the market. COVID-19 only exacerbated the situation, bringing inevitable cancellations of the two major watch fairs in Geneva and Basel that would have seen the world’s watch nuts, retailers, and press descend on the two cities in order for a week-long orgy of squinting though loupes at mechanical marvels with price tags worthy of race cars. Undeterred, the Swiss have got suddenly savvy with their online platforms, realizing that it was digital or nothing as a way to disseminate news of what they’d been beavering away at for the past year and more. The fallout from COVID-19 means that the watch industry that emerges from the other side of it may be a somewhat different place.

But the good news is that good old-fashioned luxury, technical expertise, mind-bending innovation, and sheer out-of-the-box thinking will likely remain the four pillars on which Swiss-made watches rely (just as they have for generations). And another plus side in all this is that Watches & Wonders, the Geneva show that features just a handful of top makers, was made public online for the first time this weekend, which means on top of Esquire’s best-in-show below, you can get privileged access to the crème de la crème of the industry right from your desktop or phone. Much of the info gleaned over the weekend from the WAW digital platform is so new that the arrival dates in market are also, given the current thing, somewhat foggy right now. But some things are worth the wait.