TUTTI GUCCI

2nd January 2025

Florence’s most fabulous fashion act is propelling its Swiss-made watches into the heady realms of ‘haute’ complications, as Alex Doak reports from a gleaming new atelier.

If you’ve ever flown into Geneva over Lac Léman, you’ll remember passing row after row of gorgeous Art Nouveau lakeside mansion houses, each with immaculate gardens sloping down to the water’s edge. It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic European abode, nor a more perfect setting for Gucci to showcase its ambitious new bid for hardcore, in-house haute horlogerie.

Winding up the gravel path of one of these sumptuous private residences, rented for the entirety of Geneva’s epic ‘Watches & Wonders’ trade week, you could be inhabiting an Alessandro Michele moodboard, back when the creative director shook-up the House of Gucci back in 2015 (now replaced by Sabato de Sarno). But instead of lush garments in lurid shades of patterned silk, no one expected to discover the mega-mechanical treasures on show, back in 2023.

Anyone with a keen eye on the Oscars red carpet two months’ prior might have had a sense. Gucci’s new ambassador Idris Elba wasn’t wearing his cushion-cased ‘25H’ featured in his billboard campaign. Instead, peeping from his tuxedo’s cuff: the ‘G-Timeless Planetarium’, featuring a whirring, centrally mounted tourbillon, no less. Topped by a diamond-set flower, surrounded by 12 coloured beryl stones representing the twelve signs of the Zodiac, all rotatable when you press the crown.

DCI John Luther of Hackney this ain’t.

Nor, for that matter, was anything else gleaming from the vitrines of Gucci’s lakeside villa come April: skeleton tourbillons ‘flying’ over openworked sci-fi beams of titanium; dancing bees fluttering over green opal dials beneath shooting-star tourbillon carriages; a made-to-order ‘G-Timeless Moonlight’ whose six gemstones can form your personal astral map reflecting place, time and date of birth.

To be fair, Gucci has been straying more and more from its 50-something years of solid fashion watches. Less of the ‘Bamboo’, ‘Horsebit’ or ‘GG’ codes drawn from its inter-war luggage-making heritage and Eighties glam’; more towards finer mechanicals – like 2019’s gnarly ‘Grip’, riffing on retro West-Coast skater culture (its GG-pattern ‘deck’ still in appropriately decadent gold finish).

To be fair, Gucci has been straying more and more from its 50-something years of solid fashion watches. Less of the ‘Bamboo’ or ‘GG’ codes drawn from its inter-war luggage-making heritage and Eighties glam’; more towards finer mechanicals

But that’s not to say Gucci’s fashion-watch origins were ever dismissible. Quite the contrary: the House was serious about watches long before Chanel’s Jacques Helleu started sketching his ceramic ‘J12’ in the late-Nineties and getting the hoary horologists to reluctantly concede that if fashion could craft clothes and accessories exquisitely, then that could probably extend to ‘proper’ Swiss watches.

Gucci’s immediate dominance of this newfound dolce vita in watches can be entirely attributed to the American entrepreneur, Severin Wunderman (1938–2008). A Holocaust survivor from Belgium, he was sent to LA aged just 10, from whence he charted a tireless, ever-charismatic career, his last act in life being the purchase and revival of Switzerland’s ancient mariner, Corum.

A chance meeting with Aldo Gucci in New York in 1970 led to Wunderman acquiring the Gucci licence for watches, being written a blank cheque by Signor Gucci for advance orders, his quitting as US agent for French watchmaker Barthelay, then setting about building the most unusual watch plant in Switzerland…

Buried in the drab Biel/Bienne suburb of Lengnau, Severin Montres’ staff of about 100 sat at computer consoles. Instead of wielding tweezers, they spent most of their time hard-wired into the area’s renowned cottage industry: speccing parts made to Gucci’s exacting standards, distributing them to assemblers all over the Jura mountains, collecting the complete watches, checking for quality and shipping to agents around the world.

Crucially, Wunderman’s cleverest hunch wasn’t to supply the usual watch retailers; rather, distribute through department stores, thereby promoting the Gucci brand.

Severin Montres was soon selling a million watches as year (having to live with the 5 million concomitant counterfeits pouring out of Thailand, the interlocking ‘GG’ logo having become a global icon). Gucci’s Model 2000 even made the 1978 Guinness Book of World Records, for selling over one million watches in just two years.

It was only a matter of time before Gucci would wrest things back: In 1997, the firm moved to La Chaux-de-Fonds, where QC, assembly and gemsetting has been, ever since. Now under the same Kering Group umbrella as Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga, Montres Gucci has cut the ribbon on nothing less than 9,000 square metres of purpose-built ‘Gucci Watch Lab’ bricks and mortar.

The sleek complex is in the town of Cortaillod, just down the lakeside A-road from Neuchâtel city. It comes staffed by 140 of watchmaking’s finest, poached from the area’s sprawling cottage industry. You can certainly attribute such a bold commitment to top-end watchmaking to the previous ‘eyes’ of Gucci, Alessandro Michele, whose baroque extravagance is writ large throughout the Gucci High Watchmaking catalogue.

What you can also take for granted is the know-how and resources afforded by former Kering stablemates, Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux. Before January 2022’s management buyout as ‘Sowind’, their combined Manufacture, kitted out with batteries of bleeding-edge machinery would have been instrumental in setting Gucci High Watchmaking on its path.

The new factory’s star export is arguably Mr Elba’s aforementioned G-Timeless Planetarium, which has a multicolour update for 2024: two new precious versions each set with 12 rainbow-hued, rotate-on-demand gemstones such as deep-purple rubellite, tanzanite and Mandarin garnet.

The biggest news this year, however, is an epic evolution of the core ‘25H’ and its cushion-shape framework. A chiming ‘minute repeater’ variant would normally be impressive-enough, mastered by what effectively constitutes a startup. But get this: the bezel replaces the traditional case-band ‘slider’ button as your means of ‘playing’ the inner gongs. Instead, you activate the hours’, quarters’ and minutes’ ‘dings and dongs’ by rotating the bezel clockwise by 90º.

And instead of the usual two wire gongs, a ‘carillon’ or ‘bell tower’ of three, stacked audaciously closely yet unusually sonorously. One rings-out each hour (H), all three gongs the quarters (QMH), then one for each remaining minute (M). For example, at 01:51 the watch will sound: H QMH QMH QMH MMMMMM.

Montres Gucci is singing to a whole new horological tune… and a chiming one too.

GUCCI watches are available online, at ROX Newcastle and at the GUCCI watches and jewellery boutique in Glasgow.

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