FASHION Magazine

By Karen Burshtein

If you’re still matching your bag with your shoes, get with the time and coordinate it with your watch. Say, a steel Dior Malice Detective watch with a red strap to match that ruby red Dior Detective bag. Or Chanel’s Premiere, which has a chain strap like the house’s signature quilted bag’s. Or how about Louis Vuitton’s tangerine-strapped stainless steel Tambour watch to go with the house’s citrus-toned Dhanura bag?

The fashion industry appears to be on a mission to turn watches into the It accessory. It’s one way to shake up an industry that has needed shaking up badly. These days there are so many ways of getting the time, from Palm Pilots to cellphones, and none of them are from watches.

“People might not really need a watch anymore,” admits Michel Cliff, a sales­person in the watch department of Toronto’s Birks boutique. “It’s more like a piece of jewellery. If you’re going to have a Chanel suit, you are going to want a fantastic watch that is recognizable to go with the recognizable suit.”

No wonder high-fashion labels have jumped into the watch market with both feet. In 2003, Dior jewellery designer Victoire de Castellane’s debut watch design, La D de Dior, was such a hit that other fashion-world members soon followed with their own haute timepieces. Dior fashion designer John Galliano launched his sparkly, glam Christal watch in 2005, and last year Chanel brought wrists up to the minute with the Star Trek–meets–Zsa Zsa Gabor J12 watch, featuring a white ceramic bracelet and diamond-set bezel. And this fall, Marc by Marc Jacobs released a watch collection in royal blue, burgundy and purple to match its fall clothing collection.

Spurred by the fashion world’s interest in making watches into strong fashion statements, master Swiss watchmakers have also been going into overdrive to make even more fabulous watches for women.

Women as serious watch buyers have been an overlooked niche. The overstatement wristwatch has traditionally been a macho status symbol; ladies had other baubles to flaunt. But now, high-quality timepieces for women, rife with girlie fare like mother-of-pearl dials, coloured crocodile straps and glitzy diamond bezels, are becoming almost de rigueur.

This reaction to fashion, however, isn’t coming at the expense of age-old craftsmanship from traditional watch companies. Many new women’s watches come with “complications” that do all the things men go nuts for, such as telling time at 3,000 metres below sea level, a depth that even a submarine couldn’t survive in.

“Fashion houses brought a spirit of innovation, using sapphire crystal on the bezel, for example,” says Daniel Lalonde, CEO of Tag Heuer North America. “Fashion houses have stimulated us to penetrate the largely untapped female market. At the high-end, mechanical level, it’s been mainly a masculine market.”

Tag Heuer, known for its boy-toy watches, is one of a growing number of quality watchmakers willing to bet that the better 50 per cent of the population will become as interested in serious timepieces as men. (Currently about 75 per cent of watches sold are sold to men, for men.)

Smartly, some Swiss master watch­makers are hiring women designers to help overcome the industry’s heavily masculine image—a radical shift in the ultra-conservative Swiss watch world, where women designers were long as verboten as female sommeliers or Porsche manufacturers.

“We thought, Why not develop a real collection for women, one that is technically state-of-the-art and interesting design-wise, too?” says Cristina D’Agostino, a public relations representative for Parmigiani Fleurier, a small Swiss company at the very highest level of watchmaking. Until last year, the company designed very few models for women. This past April, it launched its first women’s collection.

“We were convinced that women want beautiful watches with complications like men’s, such as perpetual calendars, tourbillons and automatic movements,” says D’Agostino. “And we thought, Who better to design a range of contemporary watches for women than a contemporary woman?”

“We think it’s easier for a female designer to design both men’s and women’s watches than for a man to,” admits Alexandre Peraldi, the design director of Baume & Mercier. The company’s deputy design director, Sabine Rochat, helped create the pristine, sophisticated Catwalk watch and the diamond-trimmed, retro-looking rectangular Diamant, revitalizing company sales of women’s watches, which now comprise half of its sales.

Jaeger-LeCoultre is a luxury watch company whose designs have been spotted on Britain’s royal wrists, but it hadn’t generated big buzz until it hired Magali Metrailler, a novice watch designer with a background in industrial and interior design, in 2000. One of her first projects was to design the brand’s sporty, beautiful Master Compressor collection, which includes the unisex Automatic model. She had to convince her skeptical superiors to put the juicy lime green version on the market, but the watch turned out to be the talk of Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) Geneva in 2004, the industry’s most prestigious fair, and women went mad for it.

Stephanie Linder is one of the first female designers at Girard-Perregaux, a top traditional Swiss watchmaker. The Cat’s Eye collection, launched at SIHH Geneva in 2003, has helped bump up company sales of women’s watches considerably. The watches have oval faces (typically women’s watches are round or rectangular) and automatic movement (until a few years ago, women tended to prefer quartz). The Cat’s Eye Bi-Retrograde, launched at SIHH Geneva in 2006, features distinctly feminine touches, including a silk strap, a mother-of-pearl face, and subtle jewels on the bezel.

Of course, monumental watches have monumental prices. The Master Compressor Automatic is $8,600, the white ceramic and diamond J12 a mere $28,500. The Kalpa Donna, a pink diamond pavé piece with complications—and options like a perpetual calendar, a tourbillon and an Hermès leather band—goes for about $376,700.

But forget about sugar daddies: The industry wants women to splash their own cash. It is marketing the trend for ladies’ quality timepieces the way the jewellery industry pushed the right-hand ring for single women a couple years ago: as a self-affirming purchase.

“Sixty-five per cent of women receive a luxury watch as a gift. We are trying to flip that,” says Lalonde. “Our belief is that the trend will be to self-purchase. That’s why we use strong, accomplished women to represent the brand,” he adds, referring to his company’s and other Swiss manufacturers’ recent use of boldface female names as brand ambassadors.

Indeed, a photo of Uma Thurman, looking as empowered as she is cool, in a sleeveless white T-shirt with a Tag Heuer Link Diamonds, really could make one think that watches just may be a girl’s new best friend.

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