Editor’s picks: looking for a new watch? Here are the Watches and Wonders 2026 releases that carry a story worth knowing—and a future worth investing in

The story of the Nautilus begins, as many great watch stories do, with Gerald Genta—the Swiss designer who, during a 1974 dinner, reportedly sketched the watch’s iconic porthole-inspired case on a napkin. Patek Philippe’s then-president Henri Stern was sceptical; a steel sports watch from one of Geneva’s most prestigious maisons felt like a contradiction in terms. He was wrong, and the industry has spent the five decades since acknowledging as much. The Nautilus went on to become one of the most coveted and—in recent years—most speculated-upon references in all of watchmaking, its waiting lists and secondary market premiums becoming something of a cultural talking point in their own right.

For its 50th anniversary, Patek Philippe has chosen for it to appear in platinum with Reference 5610/1P-001. The watch returns to the medium case size—38mm in diameter, and a remarkably slender 6.90mm thick—a proportion that consciously recalls Reference 3800/1 from the 1980s, the first Nautilus offered in a medium size, and which was itself revisited in 2006 for the collection’s 30th anniversary as Reference 5800/1A. The dial displays hours and minutes only, in the purist tradition of the recently introduced References 5810/1G-001 and 5810G-001, and the blue sunburst surface with its horizontal relief embossing remains one of the most satisfying dial textures we saw this year.

Applied white gold baton hands and hour markers carry a white luminescent coating for legibility after dark, and the alternating polished and satin-brushed finishes across the bezel, case and bracelet bring the Nautilus’s distinctive architectural lines into sharp focus. A single diamond set into the hinge at nine o’clock marks this as a platinum Patek Philippe, as is the house’s custom. Inside beats the ultra-thin Calibre 240, its 22-karat gold mini-rotor engraved with the inscription “50 1976–2026”—a detail that will be invisible to most who encounter the watch, which is entirely the point. Limited to 2,000 pieces, this is the anniversary edition for those who understand exactly what they are looking at.

Van Cleef & Arpels has maintained a relationship with the Moon that long predates its current vogue in watchmaking—the maison introduced a moon phase complication to its timepieces as far back as 1929, at a time when the Place Vendôme address was better known for its jewellery than its horology. That heritage matters here, because the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune is not a watch that arrived at celestial poetry by accident; it is the product of nearly a century of accumulated thinking about how to render the cosmos in precious materials.

The Jour Nuit collection, which launched in 2008 and has been revisited and expanded in recent years, including 2024‑style reinterpretations and, now, the 2026 Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune, has always centred on the relationship between the Sun and Moon—a 24-hour rotating disc animates both celestial bodies, each emerging from and retreating behind a guilloché mother of pearl horizon painted in a gradient from black to white. This new 42 mm white gold Midnight edition layers a moonphase complication on top of that existing display, so the Moon not only travels across the dial in its daily arc but also shifts in appearance across its 29.5-day cycle, the two complications working in concert rather than in parallel. The dial itself is black Murano aventurine glass, developed in collaboration with the maison’s own Innovation Department to achieve a depth of colour and a shimmering bronze-tone that evokes a night sky rather than merely representing one.

The guilloché golden Sun gives way over the course of each day to a Moon in white mother-of-pearl, ringed by acrylic stars and when the Moon disappears behind the horizon shroud, a pusher on the case rim triggers a 360 degree dial rotation lasting approximately ten seconds, bringing it back into view on demand. The reverse of the watch is equally interesting: the caseback carries a white gold engraving of the Moon’s topography, the sapphire crystal above the oscillating weight is painted in enamel with the Earth, and the surrounding guilloché background is dotted with miniature enamel planetary motifs—the entire composition inverting the dial’s perspective, portraying the universe as seen not from Earth, but from the Moon itself. 

When Chanel introduced the J12 in 2000, it was a provocative proposition—a luxury watch built primarily from high-tech black ceramic, a material the industry associated with industrial applications rather than the Place Vendôme. Jacques Helleu, Chanel’s longtime artistic director, had borrowed the aesthetic from the world of ocean racing and the result was a watch that looked like nothing else on the market.

A quarter century on, the J12 has become one of the most recognisable watch designs in the world, which creates a particular creative challenge: how do you continue to evolve a silhouette that has essentially become its own category? Chanel’s answer with the Coco Game is to look inward—to the maison’s own iconography—and to treat the seconds hand not as a functional component but as a canvas. Coco Chanel herself, rendered as a pixelated figure in the visual language of early arcade games, has been laser-cut from a carbon plate and mounted as the seconds hand, so that Mademoiselle trots continuously around the dial with each passing second. The technical problem this presented was not trivial: a seconds hand must be precisely balanced and extraordinarily light and achieving that with a figurative form took Chanel’s manufacture artisans ten months of development.

The result is a detail that rewards attention without demanding it—you can wear this watch without ever registering the joke and it functions perfectly well as a straightforward 38 mm ceramic timepiece. Available in matte black ceramic with a baguette-cut ceramic bezel ring and a dial set with twelve brilliant-cut diamonds or in glossy white ceramic with a white-varnished sapphire crystal bezel ring and a white-lacquered dial to match, both versions run on Calibre 12.1—Chanel’s own COSC-certified manufacture movement with a 70-hour power reserve and 200 metres of water resistance. 

Tudor was founded in 1926 by Hans Wilsdorf, the same man behind Rolex, with a straightforward brief: build watches of comparable quality to those bearing the crown, but at a price point that made them accessible to a broader public. For much of its history, Tudor fulfilled that brief by sourcing movements and components from independent suppliers—a pragmatic approach that kept costs manageable but placed a ceiling on how far the brand could push its own technical ambitions. That ceiling has been methodically dismantled over the past decade, as Tudor has invested in its own manufacture infrastructure in Le Locle, developed in-house calibres, and begun pursuing the METAS Master Chronometer certification—a standard administered by the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology and widely regarded as the most demanding independent benchmark in the industry, requiring watches to perform accurately across a battery of tests that includes exposure to magnetic fields 15 times stronger than those used in standard ISO testing.

The Monarch, which revives one of Tudor’s historical line names to mark the brand’s centenary, is the latest model to be submitted for that certification, and it arrives in a form that consciously references the aesthetic of Tudor’s earliest years—a 39 mm stainless steel case with a finely faceted profile, a matching bracelet with the brand’s T-fit clasp, and a vertical-brushed papyrus-toned dial carrying both Roman and Arabic applied hour markers, a combination that gives the watch an unhurried, classical character. The movement, Calibre MT5662-2U, is finished in the traditional manner and built from components drawn from Tudor’s network of in-house and independent suppliers. A century on from Wilsdorf’s original proposition, Tudor continues to make the most compelling argument in watchmaking that value and excellence are not, in fact, mutually exclusive terms.

Jaeger-LeCoultre occupies a curious position in the hierarchy of Swiss watchmaking—it is the watchmaker’s watchmaker, the valley workshop that has historically supplied movements and components to maisons that would never publicly acknowledge the fact, while simultaneously producing, under its own name, some of the most technically ambitious watches in the industry.

The Reverso, an art deco masterpiece of a reversible case conceived in 1931 for polo-playing British officers in India who needed to protect their watch glasses mid-match, has long been the piece most associated with the brand, and rightly so—it remains one of the most elegant and mechanically playful designs in watchmaking history. But there is a version of Jaeger-LeCoultre that exists entirely apart from the Reverso’s considerable shadow, and it is the Master Control line.

For Tatler GMT, the Master Control Chronometer Date is, in the best possible sense, a watchmaker’s watch—a 38 mm case in either stainless steel or 18-karat pink gold, measuring just 7.9mm thick, housing the in-house self-winding Calibre 899 with a 70-hour power reserve and a date display, nothing more and nothing less. The dial comes in a blue-grey gradient in the steel version or a bronze-coloured sunray-brushed finish in pink gold, each sitting on an integrated three-row tapered bracelet with a double folding buckle that feels supple on the skin, when worn. We are fond of this piece because it asks nothing of you beyond appreciation—no mythology to subscribe to, no complication to explain at dinner, just a beautifully proportioned dress watch from one of the great manufacture houses, executed without a single superfluous detail.

Cartier’s relationship with the wristwatch is longer and more consequential than most people realise—it was Louis Cartier who, in 1904, created the Santos at the request of Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who needed to read the time without taking his hands off the controls of his aircraft, and in doing so produced what many consider one of the first purpose-built men’s wristwatch. That instinct for designing timepieces around the demands of a particular world—aviation, motorsport, exploration—has run through Cartier’s watchmaking ever since, and it was that same instinct that produced the original Roadster in 2002, a watch that drew its visual language directly from the cockpit and the chassis, with a crown so fully integrated into the case architecture that it read less as a functional component and more as a structural element of the design itself.

The Roadster was discontinued, which in retrospect seems like an error of judgement, and Cartier has now corrected it. The collectors asked for it and the brand listened intently. The new Roadster returns with sharpened proportions and rethought ergonomics, retaining the defining characteristic of the original—a seamlessly integrated crown—while refining the relationship between bezel and case, and unifying the crystal, magnifier and dial into a more coherent whole, accented by the calendar aperture and metal cabochon. The result borrows, as Cartier describes it, from the world of mechanical fuselages without distorting the watch’s fundamental streamlined form. Two in-house selfwinding movements power the range—the 1847 MC in the larger models and the 1899 MC in the medium versions—both named, in Cartier’s characteristic fashion, after dates significant to the maison’s own history. It is a watch that was missed while it was gone, and whose return feels entirely justified.

To understand the Super Freak, you need to understand the original Freak, and to understand the original Freak, you need to understand the unlikely sequence of events that produced it. Ulysse Nardin was founded in Le Locle in 1846 with a single preoccupation—precision—and spent its first century and a half becoming the most decorated marine chronometer maker in history, its instruments trusted by navies and explorers as the mechanical GPS of their age. When the quartz crisis of the 1970s rendered marine chronometers obsolete almost overnight, the brand survived, and in 1983 found its second act when entrepreneur Rolf Schnyder acquired it and made what was, at the time, a deeply unfashionable decision: to invest in innovation, high complications, and craftsmanship rather than chase the market’s appetite for quartz convenience.

That decision led Schnyder to Dr Ludwig Oechslin, a watchmaking genius he encountered through an astrolabe clock of extraordinary accuracy—one day in 144,000 years—that Oechslin had built as an apprentice. Their collaboration produced, among other things, the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei in 1985, certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s first astrolabe wristwatch. But the work that would most define Ulysse Nardin’s modern identity began when Oechslin encountered a prototype by a young watchmaker named Carole Forestier-Kasapi, whose revolutionary creation had the entire movement rotating—with no crown, winding and time-setting achieved through the bezel alone. The concept was visionary but practically limited by a power reserve of around ten hours.

Oechslin relocated the mainspring to the centre of the watch, housing a two-metre-long spring across the full diameter of the case and extending the power reserve to seven days, then went further still—making the rotating movement itself the time display, with the barrel turning once every twelve hours to indicate the hour and the movement rotating once per hour to indicate the minutes. When traditional metals proved too heavy for the dual escapement’s twin escape wheels, Ulysse Nardin turned to silicon—the very material that had nearly destroyed mechanical watchmaking during the quartz crisis—and through an oxidising process that increased both hardness and smoothness, found their solution.

The Freak was born in March 2001, its name Oechslin’s own internal code for the project, and its launch—conducted the day before Baselworld officially opened, in an underground venue, with a masked carnival parade led by Schnyder himself—was as deliberately provocative as the watch it unveiled. 25 years later, and four years in the making, the Super Freak is the culmination of everything that singular moment set in motion. Built on 35 patented inventions introduced across the Freak collection since 2001, and incorporating eight patents of its own—including a newly filed gimbal system that is the smallest of its kind ever made—the Super Freak houses the world’s first automatic double tourbillon that also functions as a carousel, its two tourbillons inclined at ten degrees and rotating around their own axis within a flying carousel movement, regulated by two silicon balance wheels and two DIAMonSIL escapements, with a vertical differential on ball bearings managing the energy distribution between them. More than 97 per cent of the movement is in motion at any given moment; over 70 per cent of it is hand-finished; and all 511 components are assembled by a single grandes complications watchmaker over 60 hours of manual work. The 44mm white gold case, patented Grinder automatic winding system, and blue Nanosital hour disc complete a watch that is, by any rational measure, an absurd object—and yet one whose absurdity is so thoroughly earned, so meticulously reasoned across a quarter century of research and development, that it commands not merely admiration but genuine respect. Limited to 50 pieces.

The story of the Monaco is inseparable from one of the most consequential collaborative efforts in watchmaking history. By the mid-1960s, the mechanical watch industry was facing an inconvenient truth: the wristwatch-wearing public was rapidly losing patience with the daily ritual of winding their timepieces, and the automatic movement—which harnessed the natural motion of the wearer’s wrist to maintain power—had become the new expectation. For Heuer, whose entire catalogue consisted of chronographs, this shift presented a particular problem, since no selfwinding movement capable of also recording elapsed time yet existed. Rather than wait for someone else to solve it, Heuer’s Jack Heuer initiated what became known internally as “Project 99,” a collaboration with partners across the Swiss industry to conceive and build the world’s first automatic chronograph calibre.

The solution combined a micro-rotor winding base movement from Buren with a chronograph module from Dubois-Depraz, and on March 3, 1969, the resulting Calibre 11 made its public debut. The technical demands of integrating the base movement and module meant the crown could not occupy its conventional position at three o’clock and had to be relocated to the left side of the case instead; what began as an engineering constraint became the Monaco’s most distinctive and recognisable trait, a design decision that looked radical in 1969 and has never entirely lost that quality. The square case was equally audacious for its time, and when Steve McQueen wore one on his wrist in the 1971 film Le Mans, the watch’s cultural status was effectively sealed for the next half century. The new Monaco arrives in a 39mm case with a redesigned ergonomic profile that improves comfort and refinement without disturbing the fundamental geometry that has made it one of the most imitated silhouettes in watchmaking, and it is now powered by the in-house automatic Calibre TH20-11—a development that feels significant, because for all the Monaco’s iconic status, it has spent much of its life housing movements sourced externally. That the watch which helped create the automatic chronograph now carries a manufacture movement of Tag Heuer’s own making is, in its own way, a full-circle moment worth acknowledging.

Hublot was, by its own admission, a brand in search of a direction when Jean-Claude Biver took the helm in 2004 and articulated what would become one of the more commercially successful philosophies in modern watchmaking: the art of fusion, combining materials, cultures and worlds that had no prior reason to occupy the same space. Ceramic with rubber, titanium with carbon, haute horlogerie with football—the formula was deliberately provocative and demonstrably effective, turning a struggling Geneva maison into one of the industry’s most recognisable names within the span of a decade.

The ambassador programme has been central to that identity, and few partnerships have been more carefully cultivated than the one with Kylian Mbappé, which began in 2018 when the footballer was 19 years old and already the most discussed young talent in the sport. Eight years on, with a Champions League record and a decade of professional goals behind him, the relationship has produced its first co-created watch. The Big Bang Reloaded Kylian Mbappé is a 44 mm piece in polished white ceramic and 18-karat King Gold—Hublot’s proprietary gold alloy—with Mbappé’s personal mantra, “Trust Yourself,” engraved on the bezel at six o’clock, a detail that will read as either inspiring or redundant depending entirely on your disposition toward motivational typography on luxury objects.

What is less easy to dismiss is the movement: the Unico is one of the more accomplished in-house integrated chronograph calibres of its generation, and this iteration reveals four of its five patented innovations through the architecture of the case, making the mechanical argument visible. Limited to 200 pieces, the Big Bang Reloaded is a watch that is easier to admire technically than it is to assess dispassionately, given the weight of its own marketing—but strip that away, and what remains is a well-engineered, handsomely constructed chronograph that does not need the footballer's name on the dial to justify its existence, even if that name will be the reason most people seek it out.

There is a particular kind of snobbery in the watch industry that has historically looked past quartz movements as though precision engineered to ±10 seconds per year were somehow a lesser achievement than a hand-wound calibre requiring daily attention, and Grand Seiko has spent the better part of three decades making a quietly devastating argument against that position. The brand—which began in 1960 as Seiko’s attempt to produce the finest watch it was technically capable of making, and which operated for much of its history as a domestic Japanese phenomenon almost entirely unknown to Western collectors—has built its 9F quartz calibre into one of the most respected movements in the industry on the strength of its engineering alone, featuring a Twin Pulse Control System that eliminates the stepping motor vibration common to lesser quartz movements and a Backlash Auto-Adjust Mechanism that ensures the hands land precisely where they are meant to, every time.

The new Calibre 9F51 is a meaningful development of that lineage, achieving a smaller diameter that makes it viable in a 32.3mm case—a size the older calibres could not accommodate—without sacrificing any of the performance characteristics that have made the 9F a benchmark. Each crystal is individually selected and aged for three months before being fitted, and a thermo-compensated integrated circuit maintains rate stability across varying temperatures, delivering accuracy to ±10 seconds per year as a guaranteed specification rather than an aspiration. The two Hana-Ikada pieces that house this new calibre draw their inspiration from one of Japan’s poetic natural phenomena—the vernal equinox moment when cherry blossom petals fall onto the surface of a river and drift together in clusters, a spectacle the Japanese call hana-ikada, or flower raft—and they have been crafted at the Shinshu Shi-no-Kobo workshop, where Grand Seiko’s dial-making artistry is at its most considered.

The SBGX363G renders this scene in soft pink, capturing the daylight quality of blossom on water, while the SBGX365G interprets the same subject in blue, evoking the same petals drifting under moonlight—the two dials depict the same moment, seen at different hours. Both reference the Cherry Blossom series of the iconic 62GS collection, connecting the new pieces to a visual heritage that Grand Seiko has been developing since the 1960s. For those who still require a mechanical movement to take a watch seriously, these are not the pieces to consider; for everyone else, they represent something rather rare—a manufacturer with the technical capability and cultural depth to make a 32mm quartz watch that we think rewards attention.

Vacheron Constantin holds a distinction that no amount of marketing can manufacture: it is the oldest watch manufacturer in the world to have operated continuously since its founding, established in Geneva in 1755 and never once interrupting production across nearly three centuries of wars, economic crises and industrial upheaval. That heritage sits most visibly in the brand’s dress watches and grand complications, where the Genevan finishing traditions—Côtes de Genève, perlage, hand-bevelling—are deployed with a rigour that reflects the weight of the Geneva Hallmark the maison has carried since 1901.

The Overseas collection occupies a different register entirely, conceived as the sporting expression of that same DNA, and it found its most compelling narrative in 2019 when Vacheron Constantin created a titanium Dual Time prototype specifically for Cory Richards—photographer, National Geographic explorer, and one of the few people to have summited an 8,000-metre peak in winter—who wore it during his ascent of Mount Everest as a working field test. Two limited Everest editions followed in 2021, and the Cardinal Points collection announced this year is the direct continuation of that lineage, now offered in four titanium references whose dial colours map to the four compass directions and the landscapes they represent: white for the frozen North, brown for the plains of the South, green for the forests of the West, and blue for the Eastern horizon where ocean meets sky.

The 41mm titanium case and integrated bracelet have been engineered for both extreme robustness and genuine wrist comfort, with a matte anthracite grey finish on the bezel, crown and pusher ring creating a tonal contrast that draws attention to the cutaway notches echoing the shape of the Overseas’s signature Maltese Cross bezel. The dial rewards close examination—a grained centre contrasts with a snailed date counter, concentric circles carry different surface treatments on the minutes and seconds tracks, and numerals mark every five seconds on the outer ring, a detail that speaks to precision under pressure rather than decorative impulse. The orange hands indicating the second time zone and AM/PM function provide the one bold contrast note against each dial, and the in-house Calibre 5110 DT/3 behind the sapphire caseback handles dual time, day/night and date with an arrow-tipped orange home-time hand that is immediately legible across time zones.

The movement finishing extends, characteristically for Vacheron, to the underside of the mainplate where perlage has been applied across surfaces that will never be seen once the watch is cased—a detail that is either the purest expression of craft integrity or the most extravagant deployment of an artisan's time, depending on your philosophy, but which in either reading confirms that the Cardinal Points is a great deal more than a well-travelled sports watch wearing a very old name.

Hermès established its watch division in 1978—hence the H1978 calibre designation—but the maison’s relationship with time objects stretches back considerably further, to the carriage clocks and desk timepieces it produced for a clientele that expected the same craft standards from a clock as from a saddle. That background in objects rather than instruments has always shaped how Hermès approaches watch design, and the H08 is an expression of that approach in the current collection. The case occupies an ambiguous geometry—neither round nor square, both simultaneously—that has become the watch’s defining characteristic since its introduction, and the Squelette edition uses skeletonisation not as a statement of technical bravado but as a continuation of the original design conversation, removing the dial to expose a titanium movement whose bridges and components have been arranged with the same attention to visual structure that governs the case itself.

The Calibre H1978 S is built so that the eye moves through it rather than simply landing on it, the interlocking layers of the gear train creating depth without confusion. The 39mm satin-brushed titanium case keeps the watch light on the wrist, the structured rubber strap with its woven surface pattern draws a direct line to the house’s textile heritage without announcing the fact and the blue version’s matching Super-LumiNova hour markers ensure that the skeletonised dial—which in lesser executions can sacrifice legibility entirely to aesthetics—remains functional after dark. It is a watch that rewards the closer look, which has always been the more interesting brief.

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