WATCHES AND WONDERS

Watches and Wonders is where the watchmaking year begins: a week in April at Palexpo, beside Geneva’s airport, where most of the great houses show what they will be making for the next twelve months.

For four days it belongs to the trade. For the last three it belongs to anyone with a ticket.

The City of Watchmakers

Geneva came to watches through a ban. In 1541 Calvin’s reformed city forbade its people to wear jewellery, and its goldsmiths, left with their skills and nothing to use them on, turned to cases and movements. Huguenots fleeing France brought more of the trade with them.

By the eighteenth century Geneva was a city of watchmakers. Vacheron Constantin, founded there in 1755, has never stopped working. Patek Philippe followed in 1839.

The Two Fairs

For most of the twentieth century the watch world met in Basel. Its fair began in 1917 and grew into Baselworld, a vast hall of brands large and small, where the whole industry did its year’s business in a week.

In 1991 the group that owned Cartier and its sister houses set up something smaller in Geneva: the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, by invitation only, for the top of the trade. The two ran side by side for nearly thirty years, Basel for scale and Geneva for prestige.

Then Basel lost them. The Swatch Group walked out first. In 2020, as the pandemic cancelled the fair, Rolex and Patek Philippe, its two greatest names, left as well, and went to Geneva. Baselworld never ran again. The Geneva salon took a new name, Watches and Wonders, and the top of the industry now shows under one roof.

What to Know

The week spills into the city. The houses hold dinners, open their workshops and fill the hotels, and much of what matters happens after the halls have closed for the day.

What is shown at the fair is not sold at the stand. It reaches the shops over the months that follow, and the pieces people want most are spoken for long before they arrive.

The hall is beside the airport, and the city is a short ride away.

The Court

Watches and Wonders is not the Court’s own. Places at the houses’ presentations, invitations to the dinners of the week, and visits to the workshops in Geneva and the Vallée de Joux are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the visit: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. A member who wants a particular watch should tell the Court before the fair, not after it.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.