Watch makers play with materials to seduce a new generation of shoppers

At the watchmaking fair in Geneva, watchmakers multiply innovations in materials, with laboratory diamonds, plastic waste or 3D printing, to seduce a new generation of luxury product aficionados.

The brand H. Moser, which gained fame for its iconoclastic models, this year presented a watch coated in Vantablack, a material whose black color is so deep that it absorbs almost all light.

Placed on a black background, the watch – for now still a conceptual model – creates the illusion of a black hole and the human eye can only distinguish the colored hands.

The material, carbon nanotubes, which the German automaker BMW used to produce an experimental vehicle, is considered to be the darkest pigment on the planet.

“I wanted to bring something different from what we will see on display in three months,” Edouard Meylan, the company’s president, said in an interview with AFP. “I wanted to show the future of materials,” he added, to “explain what the watch industry could be in five years’ time.”

Although the prestigious brand has already used the material for details on some models, the model on display, entirely coated in Vantablack, cannot be touched by visitors for the time being, as this carries the risk that the material will lose its properties. The goal is to keep working so that one day it can be used.

Black is a very fashionable color, according to Vincent Grégoire, head of men’s fashion and accessories for Parisian design firm Nelly Rodi, particularly among a new category of luxury goods lovers he describes as “the virtuous”. “It’s a clientele that wants beauty and high luxury, with materials of the future, full of technology, but worked by artisans”, he explained.

lab diamonds

A new generation of lovers of luxury products is emerging, says Grégoire, who also identifies other profiles, such as “agitators”, who are interested in “recovery” and want to make their purchases “a militant act”.

In a stand dedicated to innovation, the Oris brand shows how it recycles plastic waste, which is fragmented to create a material that resembles marble, in different colors – depending on the recovered plastics – and then used to produce dials.

Tag Heuer, controlled by French luxury goods group LVMH, used artificial diamonds for the first time to create one of its iconic models.

The diamonds – obtained by chemical methods – are not used to replace classic diamonds, but to create a new texture on the dial, with unprecedented diamond shapes on its surface, which create plays of light in the center of the watch.

With this technology, the brand wanted to explore the new possibilities that laboratory diamonds offer. The watch costs 350,000 Swiss francs (about $378,000).

“There is a place for lab diamonds in the market,” said Tobias Kormind, president of 77 Diamonds, a company that specializes in selling diamonds online.

“There are people who buy laboratory diamonds for budgetary reasons, but others do so for environmental reasons”, he explained to AFP, although natural diamonds continue to be “those that value the most over time”.

At the Cartier booth, real diamonds shine very brightly. Thanks to 3D printing, the fashion label based in Place Vendôme in Paris has developed a new collection called Coussin (cushion), whose presentation box deforms slightly under the fingers before regaining its shape.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci