How Breitling, Bulgari, Vacheron Constantin and other luxury watchmakers made their mark at Dubai Watch Week 2019
Dubai Watch Week welcomed big brands such as Rolex and Grand Seiko but also featured independent watchmakers and attracted about 15,000 visitors
This November saw the fourth edition of Dubai Watch Week, a public event which attracts watch aficionados from around the world. The venue – the shiny, black marble plaza of Dubai International Financial Centre, one of the world’s top 10 financial hubs – features pavilions and pop-up restaurants for one of the global biennial celebrations of horology, Dubai Watch Week.
Not only are 44 watch brands – ranging from big houses such as Breitling, Grand Seiko and Bulgari to independents such as Armin Strom, Moritz Grossmann and HYT – showing mechanical marvels in a fair-like setting, but the event shows an industry gathering can be completely open to the public while offering initiated horology forums, workshops and debates increasing knowledge on all levels.
“We also want to allow young people to understand watches. This is a non-commercial event, because we want everybody to feel welcome and not be intimidated,” said director general of Dubai Watch Week Hind Seddiqi, who expected around 15,000, visitors, more than double the previous edition.
As watches are nowadays released throughout the year, Vacheron Constantin, Hublot, Ressence and MB&F were among the brands launching new models during Dubai Watch Week. Many of these are limited editions aimed at the region, very appealing to established local collectors. Within hours of their release, the 10 square and nine round steel watches made by H. Moser & Cie in collaboration with the Seddiqi family – bearing Moser’s hallmark no-logo top-quality fumé dials – were sold out.
The theme of Dubai Watch Week 2019 is Innovation and Technology, and as the case often is, the most surprising innovations were to be seen among the independents. With the futuristic H5 HYT has taken another step in blending mechanics and the fluidic retrograde hour system. A cam is added for exact precision in the pressure of the bellows – in the end a polymeric relationship between watchmaking, space technology and medical technologies. Moritz Grossmann looked back into the history books, replacing the rotor of its Hamatic watch with a contemporary version of a guitar pick-shaped hammer, the look of the original automatic winding systems from the late 18th century. However this German brand’s contemporary version has kept only the outline of the shape, thus revealing the mechanical movement.
