10 Watches That Changed What’s on Your Wrist

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We asked experts which timepieces have shaped modern design. Here are their choices.

By Victoria Gomelsky

What does "contemporary design" mean in an industry that perennially looks backward?

It's a serious question for watchmakers, most of whom are traditionalists at heart. (Compare the dominant aesthetic in modern wristwatches with pocket watches created 500 years ago; other than their shrinking diameters, little has changed.)

Today's boom in sales of vintage watches, as well as new models that pay tribute to classic timepieces, has only exacerbated the industry's tendency to repeat its own design history. "With most big makers, more than 50 percent of their models are heavily inspired by their own past — because they sell," said Aurel Bacs, a senior watch consultant at the auction house Phillips.

He listed the most obvious examples: the 1917 Cartier Tank, the 1957 Omega Speedmaster, the 1963 Rolex Daytona, the 1972 Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and the 1976 Patek Philippe Nautilus, all models that remain in production and continue to generate millions of dollars in sales.

But how about the current era? What will be remembered? We asked a group of industry insiders to assess the past quarter century of wristwatch design and identify the models that have had an effect on all kinds of watches, from Seiko to Swiss.

Ten timepieces, listed here in order of their introduction, made the cut — a selection sure to intrigue, and perhaps provoke, watch fans.

In the first decade of the new millennium, long before today's mania for daintier vintage timepieces began, watchmakers routinely produced colossal styles approaching 50 millimeters, or 2 inches, in diameter.

Although Panerai, the Italian heritage brand made popular by Sylvester Stallone, often is credited with kicking off the industry's size craze in the late 1990s, Audemars Piguet did it first with the Royal Oak Offshore, a 1993 model designed by Emmanuel Gueit to appeal to young buyers.

Nicknamed "The Beast," the 42-millimeter-wide and 15-millimeter-thick stainless steel wristwatch weighed nearly two-thirds of a pound, dwarfing the original 39-millimeter Royal Oak. And, in a testament to its sporty vibe, the pushers and crown were clad in rubber.

"The Offshore was obviously inspired by the Royal Oak, but it was completely strange for the time," said William Rohr, managing director of the online watch forum TimeZone. "It was extremely huge, thick, heavy."

The model's brazenly masculine design helped pave the way for the hulking timepieces of the Aughts — chiefly, the 2005 Hublot Big Bang, a mechanical chronograph that incorporated gold, ceramic, Kevlar, carbon, tungsten, tantalum and rubber. It also foreshadowed the hoopla over steel sport timepieces that dominate the luxury watch market today.

Although a backlash followed the 2008 financial crisis — the style struck many people as inappropriate after a global economic downturn — the Royal Oak Offshore remained a best seller, partly because Audemars Piguet had begun using it for limited editions featuring pop-culture figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jay-Z.

"You couldn't get them and if you did, they were immediately worth 30 percent more than what you paid for them," said Steve Hallock, owner of Tick Tocking, a Los Angeles watch dealer specializing in contemporary timepieces. "Hublot and Richard Mille took a page out of that book and that book will never be closed because it was very successful."

Viewed from today's perspective, the Lange 1 by A. Lange & Söhne is the epitome of a classic round timepiece. But when it was unveiled in 1994, its key design elements — an asymmetrical time display and outsize date divided across two windows — cast the German maker as an iconoclast.

"When it came out, there was nothing even remotely like it on the market," said Elizabeth Doerr, editor in chief and co-founder of the watch site Quill & Pad.

The model was the brainchild of Walter Lange — a great-grandson of the brand's founder, Ferdinand Adolph Lange — and the entrepreneur Günter Blümlein. And it was their first big effort since resurrecting the house in 1990. (The brand, which had operated since 1845 in Glashütte, the historic home of Germany's watchmaking industry, had been expropriated by the East German government following World War II and made to produce cheap watches for export.)

The Lange 1's then-unusual design heralded an important new perspective for the tradition-bound world of mechanical watchmaking, said Katharine Thomas, head of the watch department at Sotheby's New York, and she compared the revived company to a modern start-up that "marked a path for companies outside the general Swiss establishment."

And the success of the timepiece put the company name back on the map; in 2000, Compagnie Financière Richemont acquired the brand.

Despite the many variations that the Lange 1 has spawned, including a 25th anniversary collection of 10 timepieces introduced this year, its look remains virtually unchanged.

"Is there a more recognizable dial than the one with an outsized date?" wrote Evald Muraj on the watch site Hodinkee in an adoring review of a Lange 1 spinoff introduced in 2014 to mark the model's 20th anniversary.

Mr. Bacs said the watch offered a supreme example of German engineering: "In the car world, the Lange 1 would be a Porsche, Mercedes or another German luxury car. It's so different, it's so daring. It's so un-German but still very German, because in the end it has all the German qualities — the reliability, the no-nonsense approach."

As Eric Wind, a vintage watch dealer, said, "It's become a model that everyone wants to own — even vintage lovers."

In 1998, at the Baselworld fair in Switzerland, the French-born watchmaker Vianney Halter presented a retro-futuristic wristwatch, named Antiqua.

Fashioned in the steampunk tradition by the American industrial designer Jeff Barnes and built by Mr. Halter, the yellow gold model featured four riveted porthole-like dials of platinum in an asymmetrical, three-dimensional case, looking like something out of a Jules Verne novel.

"The front of it is this wild Captain Nemo-looking design, but if you look at the back, it's a round watch with a standard movement with a perpetual calendar," said Gary Getz, a Northern California watch collector who has written about his love of the Antiqua for Quill & Pad. "It's party in the front, business in the back."

Widely considered to be the first model to experiment with an entirely new form, the Antiqua's juxtaposition of avant-garde design with a classic mechanical movement (bearing a haute complication, no less) is why Maximilian Büsser, founder and creative director of the Geneva-based brand MB&F, considers it "the missing link" between traditional and contemporary watchmaking.

"When it came out, I ran into my colleagues’ office with a drawing of it and said, ‘Have you seen this?’" recalled Mr. Büsser, then a product manager at the Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre. "But they didn't get it; they thought it was just weird."

For all its boundary-pushing greatness, the Antiqua has not, by most standards, been a commercial hit. Slightly more than 120 pieces were made, with one model, in white gold, still available — for 280,000 Swiss francs, or $281,590.

François-Paul Journe has a cultlike following that is all but unrivaled among his horological peers. The most obvious heir to the scientific tradition of horology epitomized by watchmaking legends such as Abraham-Louis Breguet and George Daniels, Mr. Journe has garnered a near-mythic reputation among high-end watch enthusiasts since founding his eponymous brand in 1999, not to mention the interest of Chanel, which acquired a minority stake in the company in 2018.

"If watches are still around in 200 years, F.P. Journe will be the equivalent of Patek Philippe," said Mr. Hallock, the Los Angeles watch dealer.

Mr. Journe solidified his reputation as a hotshot young watchmaker on the strength of his company's second production model, the Chronomètre à Résonance, which he presented in 2000. Generally regarded as a masterpiece of modern watchmaking, the wristwatch was inspired by a Breguet pocket watch that Mr. Journe restored for a client in 1982; it featured two balance wheels in what is called a resonance movement, an esoteric example of precision timekeeping.

"The basic idea is by placing the two balance wheels very close to each other, they will pick up each other's energy and eventually beat in sync," Brad Schwartz, a New York-based collector of Journe watches, wrote in an email.

"I can't stress enough how beautiful the Résonance movement is — if I could wear mine with the movement side up I would," said Mr. Schwartz, who owned six at one point. "Adding to the beauty are the screwed-on chapter rings, the blue steel hands, the guilloché pattern in the center of each dial and the knurled crown, all signature Journe accents."

Even though most people familiar with the model say its design was secondary to its mechanical innovation — it was the first wristwatch to house the resonance movement — the truth is that the Chronomètre à Résonance established Mr. Journe's singular aesthetic.

"It's a watch that, when you remove the logo from the dial, people still recognize it from across the room," Mr. Bacs said.

When Richard Mille introduced his tonneau-shaped, technically advanced RM 001 in 2001, the French watchmaker not only broke with watchmaking tradition, he torched it.

"The first time I witnessed the Richard Mille RM 001 in the flesh was like Ursula Andress rising out of the sea like Botticelli's Venus, accompanied by the Kärntnertortheater Orchestra's 1824 performance of Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy,’" Wei Koh wrote in a 2018 post titled "The Watch That Changed the World."

Mr. Koh, the Singapore-based founder and editorial director of the watch magazine Revolution, went on to say the timepiece's sleek shape was "as erotically charged as the body of Ferrari's 250 GTO." The automotive reference was spot on. Mr. Mille — who has said he carved a bar of hotel soap into the RM 001 form one sleepless night — is a racing enthusiast who designed his first watch to both look and function like a Formula One car: Comfort, performance, shock-resistance, durability and lightness were top of mind.

According to an oft-repeated story, Mr. Mille threw the RM 001 to the ground during the 2001 Baselworld watch fair to prove to prospective clients that, despite its considerable price and intricate complication — the 200,000 euro wristwatch housed a tourbillon, a delicate revolving mechanism designed to counteract the effects of gravity on the gears of a mechanical timepiece — the sporty model, equipped with titanium base plates, could withstand the abuse.

Despite the model's game-changing construction — the Renaud & Papi movement was integrated with the case, an unheard-of innovation at the time — the RM 001 owes its icon status to its voluptuous silhouette.

"You can see a Richard Mille on someone's wrist across the street and it's not because it has neon lights," Mr. Hallock said.

The dozens of numbered RM models that have followed — including the RM 27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal, which weighs only two-thirds of an ounce (strap included), and the new RM 62-01 Tourbillon Vibrating Alarm ACJ, the brand's most complicated timepiece — are testaments to Mr. Mille's vision and staying power.

During most of its history, Ulysse Nardin was best known as an old-fashioned maker of nautically inspired timepieces (even after it was reinvigorated in the 1980s by the Swiss businessman Rolf Schnyder and the watchmaking wunderkind Ludwig Oechslin, who together created a trilogy of widely praised astronomical wristwatches).

Then, during a dinner in New York in 2001, Mr. Schnyder and Mr. Oechslin presented an outlandish-looking gold watch appropriately named Freak. It lacked a dial, crown and traditional hands; it indicated the time with an enormous minute hand that also doubled as the movement, and a rotating main plate that served as the hour hand.

The model's radical exterior obscured a movement that, for the first time, incorporated silicon, a material that has since revolutionized mechanical watchmaking by eliminating the need for lubricants like oil.

"Single-handedly, the Freak inaugurated the era of the superwatch — mechanically sophisticated, visually arresting, unapologetically exotic," Jack Forster, editor in chief of Hodinkee, wrote on the online watch site in 2018.

The Freak "questioned so many things we believed were carved in stone," Mr. Bacs, the Phillips specialist, said. Like the need for a crown to set the time (with the Freak, you simply turned the bezel).

To fully appreciate the pioneering design — and Mr. Oechslin's reputation as what Mr. Bacs called the "Swiss Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th and 21st centuries" — it is important to note that the mechanical watchmaking renaissance was only about a decade old when Ulysse Nardin made its surprise introduction. Plenty of watchmakers were still reeling from the quartz crisis of the 1970s, when the Swiss industry lost 60,000 jobs to competition from the Japanese.

Those who emerged from the crisis intact were "basically mimicking what had been done before," Mr. Büsser said. "A man's watch was 35 millimeters with a white dial and Roman numerals. We were all doing super boring stuff in those days."

You might describe the co-founders of Urwerk — the master watchmaker Felix Baumgartner and the designer and artist Martin Frei — as the watch industry's resident philosophers.

When they introduced their subversive luxury brand in 1997, the name they chose was a mash-up of Ur, the Sumerian city where modern timekeeping began, and werk, the German word for work (also, appropriately, part of the German word Uhrwerk, or movement).

"It was a play on words, this idea of a business that deals with the philosophical matter of time," Mr. Frei told The New York Times in 2014.

At the 2003 Baselworld fair, Urwerk unveiled the UR-103, "the model that made everybody sit up and take notice," said Ms. Doerr of Quill & Pad.

Priced at 60,000 Swiss francs, the sci-fi-looking steel watch was distinguished by its unconventional, satellite-based time display (inspired by antique clocks, no less) that appeared at the bottom of Urwerk's by-now-signature case.

"The shape was closer to a spaceship, and the alternative time-telling via rotating discs was extremely novel," Alexandre Ghotbi, head of watches for Continental Europe and the Middle East at Phillips, wrote in an email.

By placing the traveling hour indication on the bottom of the case, Mr. Frei was free to enlarge the crown and position it at the traditional 12 o’clock position.

"We have asked ourselves since the very beginning, what can we do differently?" Mr. Frei said in an interview.

In the UR-103, Urwerk answered that question by filling the back of the watch with three display fields that act as a control center: one to indicate the seconds, another to show a 15-minute revolution, and a third to communicate what remained of the watch's 42 hours of power reserve.

"Traditions are important," Mr. Frei said. "But you also have to comment about what's surrounding you now."

When Mr. Büsser founded his independent watch brand in 2005, he already was regarded as something of a mentor by many contemporary watchmakers.

He had earned that reputation during his seven-year tenure as managing director of Harry Winston Timepieces, where he created the groundbreaking Opus concept, a series of annual collaborations with master watchmakers — including Mr. Journe, Mr. Halter and Mr. Baumgartner — that resulted in some of the wildest, wackiest models the world had ever seen.

MB&F's first watch, Horological Machine No. 1, or HM1, was a daring, three-dimensional design, but nothing compared with its anarchic fourth creation, the HM4 Thunderbolt, released in 2010. Less a wristwatch than two miniature jet engines joined by a titanium case and strapped to a wrist, the model — which displayed the time and power reserve on dials positioned perpendicular to the wearer's wrist — was unlike anything MB&F had made before, or has made since.

Like all of Mr. Büsser's timepieces, the titanium model was a nostalgic ode to his 1970s youth (in this case, his mania for assembling model aircraft) as well as a love letter to kinetic art, a category he champions at his four M.A.D. Gallery locations, in Geneva; Hong Kong; Taipei, Taiwan; and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

"Each piece from MB&F is more of an objet d’art than a design," said Mr. Rohr of TimeZone. "People love it or hate it."

To hear Mr. Büsser, he was compelled to create the HM4, regardless of how many people it alienated. "It was a moment in my life when nothing else mattered," he said in an interview. "I had no kids. My company was everything. I needed to go to the end of that story even if that meant I was going to bankrupt myself. In those days, there was so much anger in me — anger against myself, my industry. I was a fanatic. Real creative risks don't come out of being in your comfort zone."

If you remember only one name from the annals of watchmaking design history, make it Gerald Genta. The Swiss designer spent six decades moonlighting for the 20th century's greatest makers, creating wristwatches known for their slender cases, graceful angles, sporty but elegant integrated bracelets and, as it happens, extreme commercial success.

Mr. Genta's best-known designs — the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and the Patek Philippe Nautilus — are modern-day best sellers, perennially in demand on the secondary market.

In 2000, the Roman jeweler Bulgari acquired Mr. Genta's namesake brand and set about placing its own spin on his towering legacy. Proof that it succeeded came in 2014, when the house introduced its Octo Finissimo series of ultrathin timepieces, led by the hand-wound Octo Finissimo Tourbillon, a 5-millimeter-thick titanium watch whose round bezel and octagonal case recalled Mr. Genta's masterful use of shapes.

"People have tried to play with a variety of shapes — round, square, oval and rectangular — and I think the first home run since the Genta designs of the ’70s and ’80s is the Bulgari Octo," Mr. Bacs said.

The series, overseen by the Bulgari watch designer Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, has earned raves for its design and technical mastery as well as several world records for thinness. A single watch — a refined, automatic version of the tourbillon introduced in 2018 — actually acquired three of those: At 3.95 millimeters thick, it is marketed as the world's thinnest automatic watch, world's thinnest automatic tourbillon and world's thinnest tourbillon.

"The vintage world is exhausting because nothing new comes out of it, but Bulgari kind of did it," Mr. Rohr of TimeZone said.

Whether the Apple Watch belongs on a list of horological design pioneers is a matter of perspective. Mechanical watchmaking purists such as Mr. Getz, the Northern California collector, are unequivocal: "It's not a watch. It's a connected device."

Yet there's no denying the model's ubiquity on wrists around the world. Neil Cybart, founder of the Apple analysis site Above Avalon, wrote in an email that Apple has sold 77 million watches since the model went on sale in the spring of 2015, and that 2019 revenue will total approximately $12 billion, with a growth rate of 25 percent year over year.

"Given how the total value of Swiss watch exports was $21 billion in 2018 (up 6 percent year over year), Apple Watch is about 60 percent the size of the entire Swiss watch industry," Mr. Cybart said in an email. "No other comes close to these figures when looking at smartwatches." (There have been estimates that 2019 will be the year Apple outsells the entire Swiss watch industry by volume.)

Designed by Jony Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design at the time, and the well-known industrial designer Marc Newson, the Apple Watch, with its rubber strap case attachment and minimalist architecture, evoked Mr. Newson's work with Ikepod, a short-lived cult-classic watch brand he co-founded in 1994.

Initially positioned as a luxury product, with an 18-karat gold version that started at $10,000, the watch now starts at a new low price of $199 and is promoted as a health and fitness tool. But that hasn't lessened its influence on the high-end watch business.

"It has provoked every watch collector to rethink what we do every day," Mr. Bacs said. "The design is brilliant. The size is brilliant. The wearability is brilliant."

For mechanical watchmakers, the Apple Watch's most significant legacy may be its role as a gateway to traditional watch consumerism.

"Back in 2015, 44 percent of U.S. adults wore a watch," said Reginald Brack, watches and luxury industry analyst at the market research company NPD Group. "Flash-forward to 2019 and 55 percent of U.S. adults wear a watch."

Mr. Brack wouldn't cite brand names, but he attributed that growth to smartwatches.