What It Really Feels Like To Be At Watches And Wonders

The glamour is real. So is the jet lag, the relentless schedule, and the particular magic of holding something extraordinary in your hands for the very first time. Geneva at four in the morning is a different city entirely. The lake sits perfectly still. The streets, usually threaded with purpose and motion, are empty in a way that feels almost conspiratorial as though the city is holding its breath. I always wake before my alarm during show week, and I have long since stopped fighting it. Jet lag has its own agenda. So I lie there in the dark, mentally rehearsing the day's schedule, and wait for the light to arrive.

I always wake before my alarm during show week,

This is Watches and Wonders Geneva. Every spring, the watch world migrates here - journalists, retailers, collectors, CEOs, watchmakers, all converging on one building near the airport called Palexpo for what has become the single most important week in the horology calendar. More than fifty of the world's greatest watch brands present their new releases simultaneously. The industry calls it a fair. That word doesn't quite cover it.

The Hour : Buses from the hotels begin at dawn. Most of us are already dressed.

The Place : Palexpo, Geneva. Near the airport - far from ordinary.

The Ritual : Badge. Coat drop. Espresso. Begin.

The bus ride from the hotel is where the day truly starts. You board alongside colleagues from Tokyo, New York, Milan - people you may only see this one week each year, yet somehow feel like constants. Conversations begin mid-sentence, as though they were only ever paused. Someone has already heard a rumour about a brand. Someone else has a list of fourteen appointments. By the time Palexpo comes into view, the adrenaline is already running.

Inside, the transformation is complete. What is normally a convention centre has been rebuilt into something closer to an alternate world. Each brand has constructed its own environment - architectural installations, dramatic light, walls of heritage imagery and the effect of moving from one to the next is like changing channels between very expensive television programmes. Every corner has been considered. The air even smells different inside each booth, which is either a stroke of genius or a form of sensory warfare, depending on how deep into the afternoon you are.

The espresso comes first. Always. In Geneva, this is non-negotiable, and the pastry that follows it feels like both indulgence and survival strategy. Then the sessions begin. The core of the experience, for those of us who write about watches, are the "touch and try" sessions: intimate presentations where a fixed group of journalists is invited into a smaller room, watches are brought out on trays, and the people who built them explain what you are looking at. A new movement. A new case architecture. A material no one has tried before. Press photographs, however well-composed cannot prepare you for the moment a watch settles on your wrist and you feel, for the first time, whether it is truly as good as it looked on a screen. Often it is better. Occasionally, it is not. Either way, that moment of discovery is irreplaceable, and it is the reason the industry still gathers in person rather than simply issuing press releases into the void.

A day might include seven or eight of these sessions, woven around interviews with brand CEOs and designers. The best conversations happen when neither party is performing, when a question lands somewhere unexpected and the answer that follows wasn't prepared in a green room. This year, I am hoping to pull some of those conversations out of the Palexpo meeting rooms entirely. There is a jazz club I have been eyeing in the city, the kind of place where the low light and the music create a different kind of honesty. Watch people, I have found, speak differently when they are not at a watch fair.

Lunch happens when it can. By late afternoon, when the halls begin to quiet, there is sometimes a glass of champagne at a brand booth - a small, civilised pause before the city takes over. Because the evenings at Watches and Wonders are a show of their own: dinners, receptions, collector gatherings, the industry reconvening in restaurants and private rooms across Geneva, the conversations continuing long past the point where sensible people would stop. This is where the real intelligence travels, not in the press releases, but across tables, in asides, in the things said just quietly enough.

The exhaustion is invisible until it isn't. It arrives precisely when you sit down on the edge of the hotel bed and remove your shoes. That moment - shoes off, city outside, everything quiet is when the body finally submits its invoice for the day. It is usually considerable. And yet the next morning, the alarm goes, Geneva is dark and still again, and the feeling that rises first is not fatigue. It is anticipation.

It is relentless and it is exhausting and it is among the most extraordinary weeks of the year

That, I think, is the truest thing I can say about Watches and Wonders. It is relentless and it is exhausting and it is among the most extraordinary weeks of the year. For one spring week in Geneva, you stand at the centre of an industry that has been measuring time for centuries and somehow, despite everything, time itself seems to move differently here.