Luxury fashion brands get serious about mechanical watches
High-end brands are making significant inroads into the complex world of luxury timepieces
Nonetheless, emerging from the shadows is a new group of watchmakers - luxury maisons. Many of these brands have a rich history of their own, albeit one rooted in haute couture, fashion or travel.
"People [tend to] put brands in boxes," says Nicolas Beau, international watch director for Chanel. "This is a watch specialist [or] this is a shoe specialist. There are very few brands that have enough power to become specialists in different things."
Louis Vuitton's vice-president of watches and fine jewellery, Hamdi Chatti, agrees that luxury maisons can be considered by some to be "outsiders" to the world of watches.
Generally, "a classic Swiss watch is one which has been around forever, so there is a lot of recognition for [Swiss] designs", he says. What Louis Vuitton - and other brands - offers is "a different option" for people who already have a couple of traditional watches or perhaps simply love the aesthetics of the timepieces created by these non-traditional brands.
That said, both brands have developed their own iconic designs in their relatively short watchmaking history. For the former, it is the Ceramic J12 collection which was first launched in 2000, while the latter has the Tambour collection. Another brand at the heart of this movement is Dior. Although some may consider its timepieces division to have stemmed from fashion, president of Dior horlogerie and fine-jewellery division Laurence Nicolas says: "Fashion goes out of fashion, [but] we are here to last."
Voicing the sentiments of traditional watch brands, she adds: "I would like the woman who would wear [our watches] to think about her daughter [and] to say 'I will pass it to my daughter'."
Beyond that, luxury brands have also won prestigious watch awards. Most notably, the Hermès Arceau Le Temps Suspendu was named the Best Men's Watch at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève in 2011.