Time Has Never Looked Like This

Seven hundred years. That is approximately how long watchmaking has been pointing two hands at twelve numbers and calling it done. The format is so ingrained that we stopped questioning it somewhere around the Renaissance. A circle, two hands, twelve positions. It works. It has always worked. And for most of the history of the wrist, that was enough. It is no longer quite enough.

A generation of watchmakers, some of them inside the great houses, some of them in Paris workshops with views of the Opéra Garnier, some of them in Geneva ateliers producing eight pieces a year, has quietly decided that the circle and the two hands are not the only answer. That there are other ways to carry time on the body. That the question of how we read the hour is more open than seven centuries of convention have led us to believe. What follows is not an exhaustive catalogue of complications. It is something more interesting than that. It is a tour of seven specific objects, each of which answered the question of how to display time and arrived at a completely different answer.

Dennison ALD Dual Time: The Split Argument
Dennison is a British watchmaker with roots going back to 1874, when Aaron Lufkin Dennison, who had already founded the Waltham Watch Company in America, opened a case manufacturing operation in Birmingham. The company supplied cases to Rolex and Omega in their early years, went dormant in 1967, and was revived in 2024 under designer Emmanuel Gueit, who has the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore among his previous work.

The ALD Dual Time does not present time in an unusual mechanical way. What it does is more direct and perhaps more honest: it puts two complete time displays side by side on a single cushion-shaped case, each powered by its own Swiss quartz Ronda movement, each set by its own crown on the left and right flanks of the case. Between the two displays sits nothing. No bridge, no separator, just the natural division of the dial into two stone surfaces. Tiger's eye against black marble. Bloodstone against lapis lazuli. Each half tells a different time. The dial reads two cities simultaneously with no GMT hand, no 24-hour scale, no second time zone indicator. Just two sets of hands, two moments, side by side. It is 35.6mm by 37mm, 6.1mm thick, CHF 725 at retail. Gueit's design connects directly to the dual-display watches of the 1970s, themselves inspired by the jet-age demand for time-zone tracking. The ALD Dual Time won the Challenge Watch Prize at the GPHG in 2025. For a watch powered by two quartz movements costing under a thousand dollars, that is not a minor distinction.

Piaget Swinging Pebbles: Time You Wear Around Your Neck
In 1969, Piaget's design team in Geneva decided to rethink what wearing a watch actually meant and produced the Swinging Sautoirs: pendant watches that hung from gold chains rather than sitting on wrists. The watch was first and foremost a piece of jewellery, and the time display was almost incidental to the experience of the object. Yves Piaget's position was unambiguous. A watch is, before anything else, a piece of jewellery.

At Watches and Wonders 2026, that idea returned as the Swinging Pebbles collection, and in the fifty-seven years since 1969, Piaget has pushed the concept further than the original team could plausibly have imagined. Each Swinging Pebble is carved from a single slice of ornamental stone: tiger's eye, verdite, or pietersite. The stone is then hollowed to house a Manufacture 355P quartz movement with a simple hour and minute hand display on the front surface. The resulting object is a smooth, organic, pebble-shaped case with no visible seam between the movement housing and the stone itself. The stone is the case. The case is the stone. They are the same object. Each pendant hangs from a twisted gold chain, rose or yellow or white depending on the stone variant, and responds to the movement of the wearer. Time swings. Piaget creative director Stéphanie Sivrière described the design as reflecting the maison's vision of time as something fluid rather than fixed, which is the kind of statement that sounds like marketing until you are actually holding a pebble of pietersite that contains a watch movement and a diamond-set bezel in a single carved stone form, and then it sounds like an accurate description of what you are experiencing.

Chanel Coco Game Chessboard: Time Hidden in a Queen
Chanel's Watch Creation Studio at Place Vendôme in Paris, led by Arnaud Chastaingt, operates under the kind of creative latitude that most watchmaking departments never receive. The results occasionally produce objects that test the outer boundary of what a timepiece actually is.

The Coco Game Chessboard, unveiled at Watches and Wonders 2026 as a unique piece, is a fully functional luxury chess set in black and white ceramic with a board measuring 37.9cm square, framed by 516 brilliant-cut diamonds, and populated by chess pieces whose designs translate Chanel's visual universe into game form. The kings are lions. The rooks are Vendôme columns. The bishops are dressmaker's dummies. The pawns are in gold and ceramic. The queens are Gabrielle Chanel herself, in black and white, diamond-set and precisely sculpted. The entire work contains 9,236 brilliant-cut diamonds totalling 110.94 carats. Price: approximately four million US dollars.

The time display is in the bases of the two Coco Chanel queens. Each base contains a 25mm quartz movement, water-resistant to 30 metres, and can be detached from the board and worn as a pendant watch on a white gold, diamond and onyx chain of 320mm. The chain alone carries 268 brilliants, 40 onyx beads, and two onyx cylinders. Chastaingt's position is that time here is not measured but staged, concealed, and embodied within the queens. The watch does not display time. The queen does. Which is a completely different relationship between object and function, and it raises the question of whether this is a watch that plays chess or a chess set that tells the time. Chanel seems happy to leave that unresolved.

Parmigiani Tonda PF Chronographe Mystérieux: The Watch That Hides Its Own Complication
Parmigiani Fleurier does not make loud watches. The Tonda PF line has been refined over several years into one of the most quietly authoritative collections in Swiss watchmaking: minimal dials, exceptional finishing, complications that reveal themselves only when the wearer chooses to activate them. The GMT Rattrapante of 2022 hid a dual time zone function behind what looked like a standard three-hander. The Minute Rattrapante of 2023 concealed a countdown mechanism behind the same surface. The Chronographe Mystérieux, unveiled at Watches and Wonders 2026 as a world premiere, is the third and most ambitious chapter in what is now an unofficial trilogy.

At rest, the watch is a time-only three-hander with a mineral blue hand-guilloché dial, a 40mm stainless steel case with a knurled platinum bezel, and five coaxial hands that are impossible to distinguish from three. The three chronograph hands are perfectly superimposed over the two time-display hands. There is no visible complication. There are no sub-dials. There is nothing to suggest that anything other than hours, minutes, and seconds is happening inside.

A single pusher, integrated into the case band at 7:30, a position that Parmigiani describes as one of the most demanding configurations in chronograph architecture for the movement layout it requires, transforms the watch on first press. Three rhodium-plated chronograph hands instantly execute a flyback, resetting, starting, and synchronising simultaneously. The chronograph expands across the entire dial without sub-dials, with hours, minutes, and seconds of elapsed time all tracked by central hands. A second press stops it. A third returns everything to invisibility. Five hands become three again. The complication disappears. The new PF053 Manufacture calibre inside achieves this through a triple-clutch system. The price is USD 44,600, available June 2026.

Audemars Piguet Peacock: The Watch That Opens Its Wings
Not every object on this list is a wristwatch. The AP Peacock is a pocket watch, a category that Audemars Piguet has used for decades to pursue complications and artistic executions that the demands of wrist-wear make impossible. What makes it relevant here is not its movement but its display mechanism, specifically what you have to do to see it. The Peacock is an automaton pocket watch powered by Calibre 3098.2. On the front, a luminous enamel peacock stands on a guillochéd ground, its plumage rendered in grand feu enamel with an attention to colour and detail that places it firmly in the tradition of the great Geneva enamel painters. To tell the time, you activate the automaton. The peacock's wings open. The tail fans. The dial, previously hidden beneath the automaton figure, is revealed. The wings close when the display mechanism completes its cycle. This is the oldest form of the hidden dial, the surprise watch, a category that dates to the 18th century when Breguet, Leroy, and the great Parisian makers produced watches that concealed their dials behind painted or enamelled covers activated by a push-piece. The AP Peacock is not a historical exercise. It is a contemporary haute horlogerie object that uses an automaton mechanism to answer the question of when and how time should be displayed. The answer it gives is: on request, after a performance.

Trilobe: Time in Orbit
Trilobe was founded in Paris in 2018 by Gautier Massonneau, who had a background in finance and no watchmaking family lineage, and who was simply, in his own description, bored by central hands. The question he asked was: what if, instead of keeping the indicators fixed and moving the hands, you kept the indicators fixed and moved time itself? The result is a patented display system in which three eccentric rings rotate counterclockwise across the dial. The largest ring carries the hours at its periphery. A medium ring carries the minutes in an off-centre position. The smallest ring carries the seconds. Three stationary trilobe-shaped pointers, which also serve as the brand logo, indicate the current position on each ring. There are no hands. The rings orbit. Time moves and the viewer remains still, which is the precise inversion of everything that seven centuries of watchmaking assumed.

In 2025, Trilobe introduced the Trente-Deux collection alongside its first fully in-house movement, the X-Nihilo, conceived, designed, machined, decorated, and assembled entirely at the brand's Paris manufacture at 32 Avenue de l'Opéra. The movement comprises 218 components in a 35.2mm diameter, 7mm thick architecture, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 42-hour power reserve. Every Trilobe timepiece undergoes 400 hours of movement performance testing before leaving the manufacture. The collection is priced from EUR 16,500. The display has been extended through the Les Matinaux L'Heure Exquise with a moving moon phase integrated into the rotating ring system, which required engineering the moon phase itself to maintain its orientation relative to the viewer as the seconds ring it rides upon rotates continuously. This is not a trivial problem. Trilobe solved it.

Genus: The Analemma Display
Sébastien Billières co-founded Genus in Geneva in 2019. His background includes the early days of Urwerk with Felix Baumgartner, work with Roger Dubuis, and years as the first employee at Urwerk before establishing his own movement manufacturing operation. He is not a designer who happened to become interested in watchmaking. He is a master watchmaker who decided to invent a new display system.

The Genus GNS display is protected by two patents and won the Mechanical Exception Prize at the GPHG in 2019, its debut year, which is essentially the industry's most qualified jury confirming that nobody had seen anything like it before. The hour indicators are mobile elements, called genera, that travel around the periphery of the dial and pivot by a quarter turn as they pass each position to orient themselves in the reading direction toward a fixed arrow at 9 o'clock. The minutes are indicated by a lead element and its trail of free-moving genera that slide along a trajectory shaped like an analemma, the figure-eight curve traced by the sun's position in the sky at the same clock time throughout the year. The genera travel from one loop of the analemma to the other, one orbit to the next, in a continuous back-and-forth motion that Billières describes as a metaphor for the ever-moving nature of time.

The GNS2, introduced in 2024 at CHF 58,250 in grade 5 titanium, carries the same patented display in a more streamlined, contemporary case with a semi-open dial. The movement is hand-wound in 18-karat gold, with main plate and bridges in gold and a large balance wheel with adjustment screws. The escapement module can be removed from the movement to facilitate adjustment of the display mechanism, a detail that reveals the depth of thought that has gone into the service architecture of something this unconventional.

Seven objects. Seven different answers to the same question. A chess piece that detaches from its board and hangs around your neck. A pebble of pietersite hollowed to hold a movement and suspended from a gold chain. A peacock that opens its wings to reveal a dial. An analemma traced in gold by mobile elements that orbit and pivot and return. Three counterclockwise rings that carry time around a dial like planets. A chronograph that does not exist until you ask for it. A dual-display in split stone that simply shows two cities at once and trusts you to know which is home. The circle and the two hands remain. They are not going anywhere. But the conversation around them is becoming, finally, more interesting.