Cover Cartier Myst de Cartier watch stole the spotlight at Watches and Wonders 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Cartier)
Cartier Myst de Cartier watch stole the spotlight at Watches and Wonders 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Cartier)
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Cartier, Chanel, Van Cleef & Arpels, Chopard and Bulgari made their most persuasive arguments yet for wearing your stones on your wrist at Watches and Wonders 2026
Jewellery watchmaking is one of the few disciplines in which two entirely separate bodies of expertise are asked to produce a single object, and the history of the category is largely a history of how different houses have managed that negotiation over time. The gemsetter and the watchmaker do not naturally speak the same language—one thinks in carats, colour saturation and light return, the other in torque, beat rate and power reserve—and the dial, that small and unforgiving surface where both disciplines are forced to meet, has been the site of some of the most inventive and occasionally the most awkward compromises in the history of decorative objects.
What distinguishes the houses that have consistently produced great jewellery watches from those that have merely produced expensive ones is the degree to which that negotiation has become internalised over generations, absorbed into the institutional knowledge of the atelier rather than resolved anew with each collection.
At Watches and Wonders 2026, five pieces demonstrated what that accumulated expertise actually looks like in practice, each one making the case, in its own way, that jewellery watchmaking at its most resolved is not a lesser discipline than either of its constituent parts but something more demanding than both.
In case you missed it: Opinion: is this Rolex’s most intelligent watch launched at Watches and Wonders in Geneva this year?
Cartier Myst de Cartier watch
Above Cartier Myst de Cartier watch (Photo: courtesy of Cartier)
Cartier Myst de Cartier watch (Photo: courtesy of Cartier)
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Cartier’s director of Image, Style and Heritage Pierre Rainero invokes Jeanne Toussaint as the creative antecedent of the Myst de Cartier. Toussaint, who ran the maison’s design studio from the 1930s and was known internally as La Panthère, had a particular gift for objects that were simultaneously sculptural and wearable—pieces that looked as though they had been carved rather than assembled. The Myst de Cartier follows that instinct with discipline, building its architecture around alternating curves, a domed crystal and a geometric pavé dial set within an onyx frame, with black lacquer spots applied individually by hand at the Maison des Métiers d’Art in Switzerland. The bead-set bracelet uses stones of deliberately varying sizes to create depth and perspective rather than simple surface coverage, and the gem-setting across the piece required 112 hours of work in total. Perhaps the most quietly impressive technical detail is the elastic strap, which allows the watch to slip onto the wrist without a clasp—an engineering solution that required significant research and development to achieve, and which disappears entirely into the wearing of the piece, as the best engineering always does.
Read more: Watches and Wonders 2026: Top 6 highlights from Cartier
Chanel Noeud de Camélia Embroidered Cuff
Above Chanel Noeud de Camélia Embroidered Cuff (Photo: courtesy of Chanel)
Chanel Noeud de Camélia Embroidered Cuff (Photo: courtesy of Chanel)
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Gabrielle Chanel chose the camellia precisely because it carried no meaning—no romantic association, no social baggage, no scent to make it someone else’s flower. The neutrality of the flower has since become one of the most loaded symbols in fashion, which is either a paradox or a measure of how completely she made it her own, depending on how you look at it. The Noeud de Camélia Embroidered Cuff works within that same logic, presenting itself as a bow bracelet first and a watch a distant second.
The grosgrain leather is embroidered with black sequins by Lesage, the Parisian embroidery house that has worked with Chanel for decades, and at its centre sits an 18-carat white gold camellia set with 60 baguette-cut diamonds totalling 2.46 carats, with a 0.70-carat brilliant at its heart concealing a dial that measures just 10 mm across. The piece is limited to 20 examples, which given the complexity of the Lesage embroidery work alone makes a certain practical sense. It runs on a quartz movement, which is the correct decision—anything mechanical would have altered the proportions of the bow, and the bow is entirely the point.
Van Cleef & Arpels Ludo Secret watch
Above Van Cleef & Arpels Ludo Secret watch (Photo: courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels)
Above Van Cleef & Arpels Ludo Secret watch (Photo: courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels)
Van Cleef & Arpels Ludo Secret watch (Photo: courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels)
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The Ludo bracelet has been in Van Cleef & Arpels’s vocabulary since 1934, when the maison introduced its interlocking “briquette” links as a reference to a leather belt—trompe-l’oeil. The idea was that something made entirely of mirror-polished yellow gold should move and drape like fabric and nearly a century of refinement later, it still does.
This new Ludo Secret revisits a 1949 model, assembling its hand-adjusted links into a bracelet that sets deep blue sapphires against yellow gold in crescent motifs, the stones selected and matched by the maison’s gemologists for colour consistency and cut quality rather than simply carat weight—a distinction that matters considerably more than it sounds when you are working with stones across a graduated range of diameters.
The secret watch mechanism is the detail that has always defined the category: simultaneous pressure on both sides of the buckle reveals a white guilloché mother-of-pearl dial, marked at 12 o’clock with a single baguette-cut sapphire. It is a gesture that rewards the person wearing it rather than anyone looking at it from across the room, which feels entirely in keeping with how Van Cleef & Arpels has always understood elegance.
Chopard L’Heure du Diamant
Above Chopard L’Heure du Diamant features a cushion-cased addition in 18-karat ethical white gold (Photo: courtesy of Chopard)
Chopard L’Heure du Diamant features a cushion-cased addition in 18-karat ethical white gold (Photo: courtesy of Chopard)
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Chopard has been making jewellery watches since the early twentieth century, when the founding Scheufele family earned a reputation serious enough to warrant the title “Master of Jewellery Watches”—a designation the house has been living up to, with some conviction, ever since. The L’Heure du Diamant collection traces its lineage to a 1970 jewellery watch and features a cushion-cased addition in 18-karat ethical white gold.
The bezel holds 4.40 carats of diamonds in Chopard’s crown setting, a technique developed by the third generation of the Scheufele family using V-shaped prongs that lift each stone to maximise light penetration. Beneath, the dial is onyx, a variety of chalcedony that Chopard has worked with since the 1960s and which has the useful property of being entirely unique to each piece, shaped by the stone itself rather than by the craftsman. The movement is the in-house Chopard 09.01-C—148 components, 42-hour power reserve—with diamond-set hands and four brilliant-cut diamond indexes at the cardinal points. In a category where quartz is the practical default, the decision to fit a selfwinding movement is a point worth noting.
Bulgari Serpenti Aeterna
Above Bulgari Serpenti Aeterna (Photo: courtesy of Bulgari)
Bulgari Serpenti Aeterna (Photo: courtesy of Bulgari)
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Bulgari has been making serpent jewellery since the 1940s, and the icon has been reinterpreted so many times that the interesting question is no longer whether it can be done again but whether there is still something genuinely new to say with it. The Serpenti Aeterna makes a credible case that there is, by abandoning the figurative serpent almost entirely in favour of something closer to a sculptural object—a rose gold bangle set with 122 stones across a deliberately unrestrained palette of rubellite, tanzanite, paraíba tourmaline, tsavorite, emerald and peridot, among others, arranged in round, brilliant, princess, pear and oval cuts with no particular obligation to behave.
The numbers behind it are worth knowing: 225 hours of development, 185 hours devoted to stone selection and preparation alone and more than 60 hours of setting. A yellow gold version debuts alongside it, with diamond lines defining the bangle’s head and tail against a white mother of pearl dial. Bulgari has also introduced a Digital Passport for the piece—a blockchain-verified record accessible by scanning a Datamatrix code engraved on the caseback, covering authenticity, specifications and provenance. For a category that has historically relied on paper certificates and institutional trust, it is a sensible evolution.
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As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
