From Victoria Beckham’s Breitling collab to Tamara Ralph’s Audemars Piguet designs, female fashion designers are reshaping women’s watch trends

Aug 21 , 2024

As timepieces become more popular with women, Breitling are working with Victoria Beckham while Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet have partnered with designers of haute couture. Photos: Handout

Breitling launched the limited edition Chronomat 36 Victoria Beckham, Audemars Piguet is working with haute couturier Tamara Ralph, and Vacheron Constantin is collaborating with designer Yiqing Yin

“I’ve always loved watches and especially vintage men’s watches,” says Victoria Beckham, a long-time style icon and founder of an eponymous brand. “I’m very lucky that my husband has gifted me some beautiful pieces over the years.”

She is not alone in her fondness for timepieces. Watches are becoming increasingly desirable among women, with Breitling saying its women’s segment has grown by 9 per cent since 2020, meaning women’s watches now account for 16 per cent of overall sales. That is only likely to grow given the current creative collaboration between the brand and Beckham.

Tamara Ralph, seen here with the result of her collaboration with Audemars Piguet, is just one accomplished female designer who has worked with a leading watch brand

“I’ve always loved a men’s watch, the weight of it, the hardware,” she says. “But men’s watches can be too big.” So Beckham has designed something with the same look and feel but a little smaller. The resulting limited edition watch is the Chronomat 36 Victoria Beckham, to which she has brought bold colours – the palette of her spring/summer 2024 collection, including peppermint, midnight blue, dover grey and sand – new materials and subtle details including a yellow gold case.

Audemars Piguet turned to London-based haute couturier Tamara Ralph to give its famous Gerald Genta-designed Royal Oak a feminine spin. Their partnership began in 2020 but the new watch is the first to emerge from the union. “I approached the design in much the same way as I would a piece of couture given both require enormous attention to detail and painstaking technique,” explains Ralph, who is returning to the catwalk after parting ways with her former business partner Michael Russo.

Vacheron Constantin x Yiqing Yin watch collaboration

“I ended up sketching at least 50 designs for this piece and from there narrowed it down.” The resulting Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon, which appeared on Ralph’s Paris catwalk in January, features a 3D-like dial in concentric circles of brown, bronze and gold with a frosted finish in a pink gold case that, she says, “captures the essence of both our brands, with an element of fresh modernity”.

Women’s greater purchasing power, along with more female influencers and brand ambassadors driving demand for watches, are waking the industry up to the untapped potential. Connecting with the fashion world is therefore a clever way to add authenticity. Vacheron Constantin, for example, has a successful ladies’ range called Égérie, but to raise its profile, it has drawn on the creative touch of haute couturier Yiqing Yin for a concept watch and a 100-piece limited edition moon phase. The elegant lilac design features shards of mother of pearl set in a pleated pattern on the dial in a pink gold case.

Vacheron Constantin Pleats of Time watch

It is the couturier’s first watch, which Yin admits was a challenge. “I was confronted with the unprecedented technical constraints of watchmaking, seeking to find a point of convergence with my artistic process,” she says – hence the pleats. “Experimentation has always been my guiding principle and I try to provoke encounters between different worlds.”

This she also achieves in the concept watch Pleats of Time, which takes her design further by drawing on the skills of master perfumer Dominique Ropion to create a dedicated fragrance, encapsulated in the strap and released by the wave of a hand.