'Couture Horology' - QP Editor James Gurney writes for TIME²

The world’s leading fashion houses are also the world’s leading luxury brands. This is no mistake or accident as succeeding at couture is the hardest of roads to follow in the luxury business, requiring as it does a whole cloud of qualities including, creativity, craft-knowledge, brand-management, commercial savvy, awareness of up-coming trends, the management of exclusivity to list just a few. The elite of the couture world have also proved adept at balancing the need to monetise their brands through diffusion ranges and products – no.5/J ‘adore/Fauborg doesn’t just smell good, it subsidises the incredible costs of mounting the couture collections on which the brands are built.

For most fashion houses watches used to exist even lower in the pecking order, most likely made by licensees in the parts of Switzerland even the Swiss think of as obscure and, regrettably, looking like it too. Gucci had blazed a trail in the early 1970’s, showing that, licensees could add to the bottom line in significant numbers and others followed suit, without seeming to worry too much what their licence partners were doing in their names. To be fair, no-one in the post-quartz, post-oil crisis world expected women’s watches to be of any real quality anyway.

Whatever the name on the dial, the results were generally uninspiring and hard to tell apart – even with effort it’s hard to give personality to 9ct. yellow gold cocktail watches which is what the market seemed to want most of all. The watches actually seen around the cat-walks and shows were far more likely to have been Must de Cartier or other glitterati favourites such as Piaget.

When the fortunes of the watch business started to pick up again, fashion seemed not to notice and the licence model remained the norm well into the new century. It was only once the growth of watch sales started to seriously accelerate that fashion houses started to take note. And as those sales were for increasingly more expensive watches, the licence days were numbered.

The lesson of the “It Bag” accessory boom was that the market would bear far higher prices if the quality was there.

With Chanel in the vanguard and Dior following quickly behind couture houses started to look at how these watches reflected their “brand-DNA”. If watches were to become big ticket items, they would have to incorporate some of the values that informed the couture collections.

Chanel’s route was to adopt the nurturing of craft talent that underlies their couture collection, which meant investing heavily in Switzerland and acquiring expertise within. The J12 that resulted woke both fashion and watch world’s up to the new reality: fashion and horological credibility are not mutually exclusive.

Dior’s route was different – as part of LVMH, which had recently acquired the likes of Zenith and TAG Heuer, the house should perhaps have had an easier ride. Competition with LVMH stable mate Chaumet, the departure of Hedi Slimane and a confusion as to the level the watches should be pitched all caused problems. But if Dior show some of the tensions that are thrown up when a fashion house takes watches seriously, the plus side is that we see talented and unique designers such as Victoire de Castellane entering the fray with very attractive results.

Taking watches seriously was one step, acquiring the horological credibility to really move up the value chain was another. In this it was the jewellery houses that really lead the way. Short of setting up or acquiring an entire industrial division to provide the horological input – and it is absolutely needed – the next best thing is to call in the professionals. Boucheron, whose watches were famously Edith Piaf’s gift of choice to discarded lovers, formed a partnership with Girard-Perregaux, one of the most valued and respected makers in the business and the mix of expertise and flair had proved a highly potent cocktail. 

Boucheron’s ambitions in this direction have risen rapidly, taking more complicated movements from G-P and commissioning one-off collaborations from the likes of Richard Mille and, just recently, MB&F which resulted in the incredible Jwlry1.

Van Cleef & Arpels have been working with specialist suppliers like Jean-Marc Wiederrecht to stunning effect with watches such as this year’s Le Pont des Amoureux, where the hour and minutes are represented by two lovers meeting on a bridge.

Hermès, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, have followed a similar path by forming a relationship with Vaucher Manufacture, part of the Parmigiani Fleurier group, which has matured to the point where they have taken a minority stake in Vaucher, 25% at a cost of nearly €16m, with the aim of securing sufficient capacity for their needs. While less dramatic in terms of results than Boucheron, the Hermès experience is a model of how raising the game in terms of watch-making allows the creation of horologically desirable and therefore highly valuable watches, without the house style ever being compromised or up-staged.

The up-shot of all this is that watches from the likes of Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton or Ralph Lauren can be expected to match the quality and ambition of their couture collections. Don’t just expect to see a Dior tourbillon, expect to see a beautifully made and conceived tourbillon that is completely Dior.