We used to know what to expect every year. We would have been prepared by select morsels of news towards the end of the preceding year — watch brands exhibiting at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (the Geneva watch expo held in January) would scatter little amuse-bouche treats before the Christmas vacation, pre-SIHH news releases to whet our appetites for the upcoming feast of watch novelties. Returning to work after a week of bloated Yuletide festivities would call for extreme exertions of willpower in order to snap back to full focus, ready for the salon.
Barely would we have caught our collective breath — the month of February providing only brief respite — when Baselworld descended in spring, with its deluge of horological news and watches for us to gorge ourselves to surfeited collapse.
That changed in December 2018, when SIHH and Baselworld announced that they would coordinate their dates so as to present a smorgasbord 10 days of consecutive #WatchLife in late April leading into May. (Apparently this is how they used to do it before 2010 as well, but that was a decade ago, so…) As of last autumn, the SIHH has been renamed Watches&Wonders, and Baselworld itself has been drastically altered by exhibitor departures in recent years.
The Swatch Group have their own salon in March, now. And the week ahead sees us once again in Dubai, horological (and geographical) hotspot for a concentrated dose of watch debuts and collection presentations from the LVMH watch brands. Bulgari, Hublot, TAG Heuer and Zenith have distinguished themselves as consistent top performers at Baselworld for several editions of the watch fair now, so I can predict with some certainty that the things we’re about to see will be far from disappointing.
The times, observed the great American folk poet Bob Dylan, they are a-changin’. They have been, for a while, but it feels like 2020 is the start of a new era in our industry. We’ll be reporting all week from Dubai, so stay with us as we bring you the first course of horological goodness in 2020 — straight from the source.
