Women’s work

Watches and Wonders, the annual Geneva gathering of luxury watch brands and less luxurious watch writers, is always a place for surprises. This year was no exception. There was Professor Brian Cox introducing us to IWC’s new Eternal Calendar, whose moonphase won’t need recalibrating for 45 million years (we’ll be checking up at the end of this period). Tudor’s stand had half an America’s Cup yacht hanging out of it, and Bremont got everyone talking about its rebrand.

However, the most surprising timepieces came from an unexpected avenue – women’s watches. Van Cleef & Arpels devised a whole new mechanical landscape to make flowers move for its Brise d’Ete, while Chanel created its own in-house automaton to make mademoiselle wiggle her hips and snip some scissors.

That might sound frivolous, but these watches were mechanical marvels – innovations in a space where it rarely happens. Look back at major horological leaps which appear in men’s watches. It makes sense. As Will Brackfield, watch designer at Christopher Ward says: “In modern watchmaking, a large number of the biggest and most influential brands are parts of large luxury groups where quarterly earnings are deemed very important. The male market is viewed as the safe consistent option to deliver numbers.”

“Cracking the female market could yield huge results”

Given the male domination of the watch industry, it’s easy to forget that the first ever wristwatch was made for a woman – a queen, no less. Rumoured lover of Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, presented Her Majesty with what could be described as a wristwatch as a new-year gift. However, despite the origins of the wristwatch, it’s been an arena dominated by men and their wants.

“Watches are historically the only ‘jewellery’ for men” says Christopher Ward’s senior designer Adrian Buchmann. “Also, there’s a belief that mechanics are for men, while women are attracted to aesthetics. I wouldn’t say there’s something in either brain to condition that at birth: to me, it’s more about the environment that conditions us.”

Things are changing. A survey by pre-owned watch website Chrono24 showed that, on its site, 58 percent of the watches sold were automatic, despite 52.7 percent of women’s watches for sale listed as quartz. It also showed that, although women lean towards watch brands with a strong jewellery presence such as Cartier, Chanel, Chopard, and Bulgari, one in every third watch sold is a Rolex. Whether that’s due to the powers of suggestion from their Crown-obsessed partner is up for debate.

Will believes, however, that the jewellery side of a business that also makes watches can hinder innovation in women’s watches. “These groups with giant jewellery arms are focused almost exclusively on women, so they don’t feel the need to push boundaries in watches when they can make consistent money with jewellery,” he says. “Really cracking the female market could yield huge results – but ultimately will require more risk.”

“There’s a belief that mechanics are for men, aesthetics for women:

Maybe the other question is, what would innovation in women’s watches look like? Buchmann feels that sometimes what passes for mechanical advancement in timepieces marketed as female are surface-level. “Some brands are bringing some kind of mechanical innovation and complications for women’s watches, but they always leave me with a funny taste,” he says. “There are some fantastic developments, from Van Cleef for example, but it feels like it’s still a design for a ‘Barbie girl’, something without depth. But who said butterflies and flowers are a women’s thing and gears a men’s thing?”

This might get to the nub of the problem. Flowers are not exclusive for women, and neither is an interest in mechanics the sole preserve of men. However, that is the binary in which the watch world has found itself. The two watches from Chanel and Van Cleef & Arpels mentioned earlier are mechanical triumphs, but if looked at in another way, the gears and wheels are being used to do something essentially frivolous – a byword for feminine. As women, sometimes it feels as if we’re expected to appreciate the spectacle but not ask too many questions about the science.

But, to spin this argument another 180 degrees: why should innovation always be practical? What’s wrong with employing science and mathematics to the service of beauty and whimsy? Why is Van Cleef & Arpels’s design team finding a solution to making an enamel flower-head on a stalk move any more worthy than George Daniels creating the co-axial escapement? Maybe the question isn’t: “Why isn’t there more innovation in women’s watches?” but rather, “Why are we still framing that question through the male gaze?”