THE LIMITS OF IMPOSSIBILITY
A true showstopper at Baselworld this year, Hublot has become the Houdini of watchmaking
WHEN YOU GO in and out of Baselworld, you can be completely enthralled and say that watches find no limits in design. Or you can feel the polar opposite: that everything looks the same in the end. A walk into Hublot’s booth, or any of its boutiques around the world, however, will have you walk out with a big grin of satisfaction.
Truth is, Hublot is a showman’s brand. Its booth at Baselworld 2017 was full of electronic displays and state-of-the-art technology. Many watches were displayed literally out of the box; you could see 10 or more put on waist-high pedestals, which could, quite unexpectedly, rotate in a blink of a second to present its sort-of alter ego (or, most likely, the other case version). That also happened with a playful lighting arrangement, and there was an additional kinetic sensor that could detect a swiping hand movement to rotate the watch once more on command. If that was not enough to excite you, the new Ferrari Aperta car on the side surely would.
To take Hublot as a person, he is quite possibly like Houdini. In whatever he does, the showman never ceases to amaze. Even under the hardest hurdle, he is sure to escape with much fanfare and applause.
Shades and Sensibility
Only last year did Hublot seem to be a jack of all trades, though. It had seethrough sapphire watches, Berluti leather-filled chronometers and a Maxime Plescia-Büchi-designed timepiece. This year, it upgraded all those and brought more to the table.
Sapphire watches, to be frank, are a craze that only a few Swiss brands can afford to do. It takes hours and hours to create one, and not everyone would dare to sport it on the wrist. But following last year’s black and white sapphire watches, this year Hublot released coloured sapphires: red and blue. While this might sound simple, the watch seen on hand looked really hard to define. The red color, perhaps due to its opacity, is of many shades under the lights. The blue sapphire was apparently harder to create in terms of color, and thus way more expensive than the other. Again, the blue appeared in varying tones depending on the lighting and angle. More importantly, only Hublot could produce such a stunning work of art.
The Berluti x Hublot watch was such a great success last year that, instead of only the brown with the Scritto etching (Berluti’s prized signature), now both the brown and the black bear the handwriting marks on the fine leather straps and dials. There’s even a chronograph version for the all-black option.
Another pioneering trend that Hublot already made a big splash on is the tattoo-inspired watch, in which the Swiss company sought after the expertise of Maxime Plescia-Büchi, founder of Sang Bleu in London. Last year’s geometric masterpiece now got updated with three cool versions: all-black, gold and full diamond set. Any piece is a musthave for tattooed royals.
Escaping the Obvious
Hublot at the same time bucks the general trend of going after the “affordable luxury” market with the showcasing of two firsts at Baselworld 2017.
After several years collaborating with Ferrari, this year those two turn the table: Ferrari holds the design brush. The Hublot Techframe is the dashing result, where the 45mm watch comes with an uncanny skeleton case in three distinct materials—including the super-light PEEK carbon. That’s also why the Ferrari logo goes bigger than the other on this year’s dial.
Another first was achieved by the MP-09 Tourbillon Bi-Axis watch - Hublot’s first in-house movement to feature such a complicated tourbillon. The case is very eye-catching, looking a little like the silhouette of a human skull. This one, interestingly, exists in three versions, including one in full diamond pavé.
The abundance of diamond versions at Hublot this year definitely did not go unnoticed. Maybe it intended to break the barrier of not only what’s possible to create but also between a men’s and ladies’ watch. Then again, a luxury watch was never about masculinity or femininity. And like Houdini, Hublot was never destined to be constrained in a straightjacket of genders or mediocrity.