Materials! It seems such a quotidian thing, but materials are in fact a huge part of how we view and form our first impressions of any watch. Back when timepieces as a whole were objects of luxury, soft precious metals like gold and silver were used primarily. Then came the advent of steel, and later stainless steel, which allowed watches to reach wider masses. In the 1970s, stainless steel—cheaper and hardier than gold—received such fine craftsmanship that it was, in its own way, elevated to a luxury material by certain watchmakers.
These days, steel is the standard, while gold and platinum represent precious luxury. But while tradition is something watchmakers tend to maintain and uphold, it doesn’t mean that the choice of materials used in watches needs to be stuck in the past. We are, in fact, entering a new age of materiality—and a trend that has surfaced this year is a pioneering and exploratory spirit to seek new ways to craft watches.
Ahead of the game
One advancement that has cemented its place in the field is ceramic. Chanel was one of the earliest to recognise its potential as a luxury. When the brand broke into the field of fine watches with the J12, cased in highly resistant black ceramic, it introduced a new paradigm for a new millennium. The rest of the watch world has kept pace since, and you’ll find, in the line-ups of a healthy majority of watch brands today, if not full ceramic designs then certainly some incorporation of it. It’s certainly not the case that Chanel has kept still since introducing ceramic.
This year, the Parisian brand’s watchmaking arm put on show its mastery and expertise of this material—underscoring and emphasising that it still leads the charge. Chanel did this through the pinnacle piece of its Coco Game capsule collection: a Chess Board crafted with so much complexity that it almost leans closer to an objet d’art than a timepiece.
The piece is built on a black lacquered wood base, with sliding drawers on two sides to store the chess pieces in. The game’s board is shaped from glossy black obsidian, with 516 diamonds (approximately 15.48 carats) set around its border, and 64 black and white squares made from ceramic. So far, so simple.
It’s in the 32 playing pieces—made from ceramic, gold and diamonds—that Chanel has achieved something extraordinary. In design, they draw on symbols from the brand’s mythos. Gabrielle Chanel in a tweed suit and boater hat is the queen. The king is represented by the lion of her star sign, also the symbolic heart of Chanel fine jewellery. Stockman mannequins, that essential of the couture ateliers, are the bishops. The horsehead knights feature braided manes that recall the galon trims on Chanel jackets. And the rook is represented by miniature Vendôme columns, capped with the house’s signature Byzantine cross motif.
The use of ceramic to form such detailed, miniature sculptures is a feat. Machining a circle with some edges and corners to create a watch case is one thing. Creating three-dimensional forms in detailed miniature is quite another. Ceramic pellets are first melted and moulded, then each piece is machined to a rough form using an advanced five-axis process that takes 10 to 14 hours to bring out the desired level of detail. The pieces are then baked—a part of the process which runs the risk of deforming and thus being thrown out to start anew—before being sandblasted and hand-polished for matt and glossy finishes. Each chess piece is made of between 10 and 20 hand-assembled components, which means this complexity is multiplied by a not insignificant factor.
After one laborious process comes another: goldsmithing and gemsetting. White gold components are shaped with lost-wax casting, then finished by hand to reveal their lustre. The diamonds throughout the chess pieces are, with one exception, snow set so that the gemstones completely blanket and cover the surfaces.
The exception happens to be one of Chanel’s innovative new techniques, tweed setting, which is used on the jacket and skirt of the white queen. Instead of setting diamonds with round beads or prongs, the gold is delicately hammered by hand into vertical and horizontal shapes that recreate the warp and weft of bouclé tweed.
It’s an astonishing detail of savoir-faire to behold and brings out the couture quality of the Gabrielle Chanel statuettes. And in case you were wondering where the watchmaking is in this objet d’art, it’s hidden as a secret dial on the base of the queen pieces.
Rarer than gold
The most experimental materials seen this year were metals that are, in some ways, rarer than gold or even platinum. Tantalum, for example, is a very hard and scratch-resistant metal—more challenging to work and craft with than platinum or ceramic, which explains its rarity in finished watches. H. Moser & Cie. took on the challenge and introduced this year an Endeavour Perpetual Calendar Concept with a whole case and dial crafted from tantalum. The metal’s cool blue undertone gives it a frosty, above-it-all look, and a severe, offhanded chic.
Hublot, meanwhile, tapped into the rarely heard-of osmium. Said to be the rarest metal on our planet, when osmium is crystallised into a stable form it settles into a highly reflective sparkling material that resembles finely hammered Florentine gold. Hublot has set it as a composition of osmium shard appliqués on the dial of the fittingly named Spirit of Big Bang Impact Sapphire.
Lightness of being
Titanium, more commonly imagined as the high-tech metal that plane wings are made of, is fast becoming a mainstay in watchmaking. Its particular combination of qualities makes it attractive: robust even though it is about half as light as steel, corrosion resistant so it is almost impervious to changing colour, and it takes a matt finish exceedingly well to offer an alternative to shiny polished designs.
These have so far given titanium a strong association with sportiness, of watches that feel unobtrusive and wear like a feather on the wrist. The evolution of fine timepieces from being occasion pieces that are mostly kept in a safe to pieces that might be worn daily is influencing luxury watchmakers to keep up and offer titanium in beautiful ways that speak to this outgoing sensibility.
Vacheron Constantin, for example, unveiled a quartet of Overseas Dual Time Cardinal Points with a rugged look. The classic Overseas has the sensibility of jet-setting to urban cities the world over, but these new designs evoke untamed adventures—sand surfing in the Sahara or going on safari in Maasai Mara perhaps.
At Bvlgari, the Octo Finissimo has long been based on titanium. The metal’s lightness, after all, complements the visual impressiveness of its slender profile. The Octo Finissimo has so far been an ostensibly masculine watch, though this year the Roman house is widening its appeal with the introduction of a 37mm model. This new size is easier to wear on smaller wrists, and perhaps the most telling evolution in design is the collection’s first titanium model with a satin-polished finish. It gives the Octo Finissimo a dressier, ungendered look, and broadens the horizons for one of the maison’s horological icons.
The June 2026 ‘Embody’ edition of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands.
