Luxury watchmaking in 2026 has been anything but predictable (is it ever?) Alongside the familiar parade of precious metals, complicated movements and painstakingly finished dials, this year’s most interesting launches have really shaken things up.
We’ve seen watchmakers experiment with unusual materials, collaborate with unexpected brands, and find new ways to combine centuries-old craftsmanship with ultra-modern engineering.
Here are 17 of the most incredible luxury watches launched in 2026 – from technically bonkers to beautifully understated.
1. Daniel Roth Extra Plat Rose Gold Gilt
Starting with perhaps the most understated watch on this list, Daniel Roth has revived the gilt dial, in which the numerals are not printed on but revealed from a solid gold base plate beneath a glossy black surface. The black is built up through repeated electroplating, judged by eye, over a pinstripe guilloché. The result is a dial with real depth.
The 5N rose gold double-ellipse case measures 38.6 x 35.5mm and is just 7.7mm thick. Inside is the manual-wind DR002, with 143 components, a 65-hour reserve and hand-finished bridges. Priced at CHF 55,500 excluding taxes.
2. Laurent Ferrier Classic Moon Dusk – Série Atelier
For the first time, Laurent Ferrier’s pebble-shaped Classic case is available in yellow gold, at 40mm. The dial fades from taupe to chocolate in opaline. The moon disc is gold sheen obsidian, engraved and hand-painted with Super-LumiNova-enhanced stars. A plique-à-jour enamel bridge in anise yellow sits over it.
The manual-wind LF126.02 combines an annual calendar with a moon phase and offers 80 hours of power reserve. Only 20 pieces will be made, priced at CHF 93,000 excluding taxes, and sold exclusively direct from the brand.
3. De Bethune DB25 Digitale
De Bethune turns time into a nocturnal scene. Jumping hours appear in a window, minutes on a rotating disc, and a spherical moon sits at the centre, with palladium and flame-blued steel hemispheres accurate to one lunar day every 1112 years.
The 42mm grade 5 titanium case frames a dial of random guilloché on blued titanium, ringed by a barleycorn-engraved band, with 82 elements in total. On the back, the same guilloché extends for the first time onto the deltoid bridge of the DB2144V3 calibre.
4. Girard-Perregaux Laureato Fifty Tourbillon Micro-Rotor 39mm
Girard-Perregaux slims its tourbillon down to 10mm in a 39mm steel Laureato. It is powered by the new GP8410, which has a platinum and pink gold micro-rotor shaped like the brand’s arrow bridge, 207 components and a 72-hour reserve. The lyre-shaped cage sits under a white gold bridge at the bottom of the dial.
There are two dial options: a translucent blue Grand Feu enamel, or an 18K solid gold rose-toned finish. Both carry the Clous de Paris pattern, which is echoed on the movement’s two large bridges. It’s an unusually wearable route into tourbillon ownership.
5. Bvlgari Octo Finissimo Dual Time x Vianney Halter
This is the first time an independent watchmaker has worked from the Octo Finissimo’s own movement. Vianney Halter’s retrofuturist, Jules Verne-flavoured style arrives as four opaline dials, blue shaped hands and a red arrow seconds hand. Hours and minutes, GMT, date and day/night each get their own display.
The 40.5mm case is 9.70mm thick and houses the 5.49mm BVF 200 micro-rotor calibre, with a platinum rotor engraved with Halter’s signature and a 60-hour reserve. Sandblasted titanium is limited to 30 pieces, while the rose gold on brown alligator is limited to just 15.
6. Roger Dubuis Excalibur Bi-retrograde Perpetual Calendar
Roger Dubuis pairs its signature bi-retrograde day and date, which sweep across elliptical scales and snap back, with a new calibre, the RD850. It has 435 components and a 60-hour reserve, and it adds a month corrector for easy setting. An astronomical moon phase at 6 o’clock is rounded to 29 days, 12 hours and 45 minutes and stays accurate for around 122 years.
The 40mm 18K pink gold case frames a nine-layer dial in new Astral Blue mother-of-pearl. The movement carries the Poinçon de Genève, and its inner angle finishing appears 14 times on the retrograde bridges.
7. Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar
Vacheron’s patented dual-frequency system gives the wearer two modes: 5Hz Active, with a four-day reserve, and 1.2Hz Standby, with 70 days. The jump to 70 days is a five-day gain over the 2019 concept watch, helped by a new date-change mechanism that needs a quarter of the usual torque. The perpetual calendar jumps instantaneously.
The hand-wound Calibre 3610 QP has 480 components and carries the Geneva Seal. The 42mm platinum case is 12.3mm thick, with a sapphire-and-guilloché open-worked dial and a black calfskin strap with red stitching.
8. Krayon PAC-MAN
Krayon’s Pac-Man watch, shown at Time To Watches, is a serious sunrise-and-sunset calculator in disguise. The platinum 39mm case holds the 432-component C030 calibre, with a 72-hour reserve. The day/night indicator is Pac-Man, who eats his way round a 24-hour dial.
The ghost’s eyes show sunrise, the “big cookie” marks sunset, and the ghosts turn blue at midnight. The 1980 maze is printed in translucent tampography on an onyx dial, with hand-painted ghosts and fruit. All 15 pieces are unique, with ghost and fruit positions varying from watch to watch.
9. Richard Mille RM 41-01 Tourbillon Soccer
The Richard Mille RM 41-01 Tourbillon can track an entire football match on while on your wrist. A match-phase indicator at 9 o’clock steps from first half to second half to overtime. Mechanical goal counters, one for each side, run to nine goals before resetting.
The movement was five years in development, with Audemars Piguet Le Locle, and combines a tourbillon with a patented double-column-wheel flyback chronograph and a 70-hour reserve. It has around 650 internal components in a skeletonised titanium architecture. The tonneau case comes in Red Carmin Basalt TPT or dark blue Quartz TPT, and only 30 pieces will be made.
10. Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Hybris Artistica Calibre 179 Pegasus
The Year of the Fire Horse has inspired a Reverso with a 180-hour hand-engraved Pegasus against clouds on its 18K pink gold case. The front dial is hand-lacquered in blue, with cloud-shaped hollows filled by hand. The fourth-generation Gyrotourbillon has 123 components, a cage turning every 16 seconds and a carriage every minute.
The Duoface movement adds a second time zone on the skeletonised back. The case measures 51.1 x 31mm and is 12.41mm thick, on a blue alligator strap with a clasp that adjusts to 0.5mm. Only five will be made.
11. Louis Vuitton Tambour Taiko Arty Automata
Following Swatch x Audemars Piguet, Louis Vuitton has gone pop. A 42mm white gold case holds a champlevé enamel dial in 23 shades, representing over 250 hours of work. Seven animations run at the touch of the 8 o’clock pusher: four spinning Monogram Flowers, a swivelling feather-lashed eye, a rocking candy-pink heart and a “LOVE” that flips to “MOVE”.
A flying tourbillon sits at 6 o’clock under a peace-symbol bridge. The bezel carries 43 baguette-cut sapphires and five rubies in a rainbow gradient, totalling 2.64 carats. Inside is the 363-component LFT AU05.01, with a 65-hour reserve.
12. Hublot MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons
Sure, the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog got all the headlines, but Hublot and Jeff Koons also launched the MP-14 Origin last month. It is Hublot’s first automatic central tourbillon, in the HUB9014 calibre, with 594 components and a peripheral oscillating weight. The 44mm octagonal case is sapphire and titanium, and needs about 534 hours of machining.
A sapphire dome inspired by Koons’s Gazing Ball works, hand-coated in blue varnish, sits over the tourbillon. Concentric rings carry 202 diamonds and sapphires, totalling around 2.6 carats, with floating cubes for hours and minutes. Limited to 30 pieces, it costs CHF 405,000.
13. A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “Lumen”
this is one of the most technically and visually ambitious watches shown at Geneva this year. The combination of a tourbillon, perpetual calendar and luminous moon-phase display in the iconic Lange 1 case is remarkable enough – but the glowing sapphire dial, which charges continuously under UV light and illuminates every single complication in the dark, elevates this into a class of its own.
Limited to just 50 pieces and housed in a 950 platinum case, the Lumen is not a watch for everyone, but for those it is for, nothing else at the show comes close.
14. H. Moser & Cie. Reebok Streamliner Pump
It’s certainly not the most expensive watch on this list, but this might be one of the weirdest and most unexpected collabs we’ve seen this year – H. Moser & Cie. and Reebok. It should not work as well as it does. H. Moser replaced the traditional crown with an anodised aluminium pusher (Reebok’s iconic Pump button) that winds the movement by hand, one press at a time. Each press delivers over an hour of power reserve. The forged quartz fibre case is lightweight, matte, and unique in pattern on every single piece. It’s playful and technically serious at once, which is exactly the Moser brand ethos.
15. Ulysse Nardin Freak [ONE Guilloché]
The Ulysse Nardin Freak has never been interested in doing things the conventional way. The Freak [ONE Guilloché] takes that same wonderfully strange approach and adds a dose of traditional decorative watchmaking. There’s still no conventional dial, hands or crown: the movement itself rotates to indicate the time, with the flying carousel completing a rotation every hour and the hour disc making a full turn every 12 hours.
What makes this 2026 version special is the hand-crafted guilloché pattern applied to that hour disc, using a traditional flinqué stamping process to reproduce the artisan-created motif. It sits inside a 44mm titanium case, with a sand-toned finish and grey ballistic-textured rubber strap. Inside is Ulysse Nardin’s UN-240 calibre, complete with silicon components, DIAMonSIL escapement, Grinder automatic winding and a 90-hour power reserve. Only 99 will be made.
16. Casio G-Shock MR-G MRG-D5000
The MR-G range has always been where G-Shock’s famously tough construction meets traditional Japanese craftsmanship, but the MRG-D5000 takes that to the next level. Its bezel and case are made using blue sapphire crystal, with Casio developing a new version of its MR-G Multi-Guard Structure to protect the notoriously brittle material from impacts. The multi-component construction is assembled without the screws, instead slotting together like a puzzle.
Underneath sits a Gallium Tough Solar module designed for durability and efficient charging. The result is a very luxurious, exotic take on the square G-Shock: still built around toughness, but now rendered in a jewellery-like shade of blue. Only 20 pieces will be produced worldwide, making this one of the year’s rarest, most expensive G-Shock ever made.
17. Rolex Daytona ‘Four Seasons’ Collection
Rolex doesn’t often do one-off watches, which makes this colourful quartet of Cosmograph Daytonas particularly unusual. The ‘Four Seasons’ set comprises four unique watches, each representing a different season through its combination of precious metal, coloured gemstones and unusual stone dials. They were originally destined for a single collector at a reported price of around CHF 4 million, but Rolex instead put all four up for auction individually, with the proceeds going to the Federer Foundation and Re:wild.
The watches sold at Phillips in London on 28 September, raising a combined US$49.5 million for the two charities.
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