After A Fashion: Why Watchmakers Are Teaming Up With Designers

Breitling x Victoria Beckham campaign

A Long-Running Romance

Such partnerships are not new. In 1968, Christian Dior joined forces with American watchmaker Bulova on a collection of manually wound 14-karat gold watches that grew into a nearly decade-long partnership. Parisian designer Pierre Cardin followed in 1971 with his own line of mechanical watches in steel, plastic and Lucite.

Two decades later, Swatch joined forces with Vivienne Westwood on a series of playful Pop Swatches, including designs decorated with the British designer’s Orb motif.

Since then, the relationship between fashion and horology has only grown bigger and bolder. Most recently, Japanese maker Citizen teamed up with Vera Wang on a 24-piece watch collection due to launch next spring. The line spans everyday watches for both sexes and jewellery-inspired designs, with Wang involved in everything from the choice of materials to the case architecture.

‘My decision to partner with Citizen was deeply intentional,’ says Wang. ‘With more than a century of watchmaking expertise, they bring a level of technical innovation and craftsmanship that’s rare in the industry.’

Breitling x Victoria Beckham campaign

Seiko x Rowing Blazers

Meanwhile, Seiko is now on its fourth collaboration with the preppy New York clothing label Rowing Blazers, which has seen the Rally Diver, a colourful Seiko sports watch first launched in 1969, reimagined with two new versions, a 38mm model in racing green and a 42mm model in a bright-blue shade.

Designed alongside Eric Wind, a vintage watch dealer and the owner of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, the watches are decorated with Rowing Blazers’ signature monogram on the crown and a graphic of a dripping tap, the label’s ‘Bath Club’ emblem, on the caseback.

‘Watches are so important to our brand,’ says Rowing Blazers’ senior collaborations manager, Tommy Cissel, who describes the new models as a way to ‘honour the heritage of both brands’.

For Wind, the project circles back to where his own collecting journey began. ‘The first vintage watch I ever purchased was a 1969 Seiko 5 Sports Rally Diver,’ he says. ‘It is a privilege to design and release the next chapter of this collaboration.’

Yiqing Yin with the dress that inspired Vacheron Constantin’s Égérie Pleats of Time concept watch

Hublot x Samuel Ross

Such partnerships are also present in the rarefied world of high watchmaking, with few brands as enthusiastic as Hublot, which has worked with the legendary Yohji Yamamoto since 2020 and also built a fruitful relationship with British fashion designer Samuel Ross. After winning Hublot’s Design Prize in 2019, Ross went on to reinterpret the brand’s flagship Big Bang through his own industrial design language.

Their latest partnership is the Big Bang Unico SR_A, a 42mm all-black ceramic chronograph powered by Hublot’s in-house Unico movement and named after Ross’ design studio.

Hublot CEO Julien Tornare says the designer first caught the brand’s attention as ‘one of the most interesting creative voices of his generation’, moving naturally ‘between industrial design, fashion and art’ and bringing a ‘360-degree approach’ to the partnership.

‘He thinks about the object, the structure, the materials, the packaging, even the way a piece lives in space,’ Tornare says. ‘What’s fascinating for us is how strongly the Samuel Ross pieces resonate with clients who sit at the intersection of watches, fashion and contemporary art.

‘It feels like a natural extension of his fashion collaborations, but at the same time it anchors them in serious watchmaking, which is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue we want Hublot to be part of.’

H. Moser & Cie. x Reebok

H. Moser & Cie., one of independent watchmaking’s buzziest, most inventive names, has embraced a fashion crossover too. Last April it dropped a collaboration with footwear label Reebok, translating the Pump, first launched in 1989, into watch form.

‘It wouldn’t have been interesting to simply put a Reebok logo on a watch,’ says H. Moser & Cie.’s CEO Edouard Meylan of the new Streamliner Pump timepiece. ‘The breakthrough came when we found a genuine concept.’

On the original Reebok Pump, pressing the orange button on the tongue inflated chambers inside the trainer to tighten its fit. Moser has recreated that same action on the watch, replacing the traditional winding crown with an orange pusher that winds the mechanical movement each time it is pressed.

‘It’s playful, mechanical and instantly familiar,’ says Meylan. ‘It proves that you can step into an unexpected cultural space without compromising your identity. Sometimes you discover your own brand more clearly by seeing it through someone else’s icon.’

Vacheron Constantin’s Égérie Pleats of Time concept watch

From Couture To Concept Watches

Almost every corner of the watch world is experimenting with fashion partnerships in some form. In 2024, Breitling joined forces with Victoria Beckham on a limited-edition take on its Chronomat Automatic 36.

That same year, Audemars Piguet collaborated with couturière Tamara Ralph on the design of a Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon inspired by her couture creations, following a relationship that began in 2020.

Elsewhere, Vacheron Constantin has turned to the Chinese-born, Paris-based couture designer Yiqing Yin for the one-of-a-kind Égérie Pleats of Time concept watch, which recreates the pleating and draping of a gown with slivers of mother-of-pearl and layers of silk thread.

Fashion may be the latest creative universe that watchmakers are tapping into, but judging by the pace of new partnerships, it’s far from a passing trend. For brands on both sides, such coveted crossovers are now a permanent part of the design conversation.