If last year’s Watches and Wonders felt like it was playing against a backdrop of geopolitical chaos (with Trump's tariff bombshell sending a shiver through the Swiss watch industry), the 2026 edition arrives with its own complicated backdrop. The downturn that has been gnawing at Swiss watchmakers for the past two years hasn't fully lifted, and the industry is still finding its footing in a world where Chinese appetite remains muted and a booming secondary market is increasingly the first port of call for buyers discouraged by ever-rising retail prices.
And yet Geneva looks set to deliver. The 2026 show is shaping up to be the largest watchmaking gathering ever organized in the city, with a significant storyline being the return of Audemars Piguet, absent from the show since 2019.
But above all, 2026 is a year of anniversaries. Patek Philippe is marking the 50th birthday of the Nautilus. Tudor is celebrating its centenary. Most anticipated is the 100th year of Rolex’s Oyster case, which gave rise to the world’s first mass-market waterproof wristwatch in 1926. The Rolex Day-Date also turns 70 this year, introduced in 1956 as the first watch to display both the day and date spelled in full, affording the world's largest luxury watch brand two landmark occasions to shout about.
As ever, the timepieces themselves cut through the noise. Here are our top picks from the show so far, and we’ll be updating this throughout the week as we find more WIRED watches.
Courtesy of IWC
IWC Pilot’s Venturer Vertical Drive
The Pilot's Venturer Vertical Drive is IWC’s first watch designed from the ground up for human spaceflight. This isn’t a modified terrestrial pilot's watch with a few space miles on it; it’s a purpose-built instrument engineered in partnership with Vast, the company behind Haven-1, scheduled to be the world's first commercial space station.
The problem it solves is practical. Astronauts can't easily operate a crown while wearing Extravehicular Activity (EVA) gloves, so IWC has ditched it entirely. A patent-pending rotating bezel now handles all functions (winding, time-setting, and switching between the two displayed time zones) via a clever clutch system called Vertical Drive. A rocker switch on the case side flips between the modes.
The sleek black dial, stripped to essentials to avoid light reflections, shows two times plus a 24-hour scale (essential in orbit, where you'll experience 16 sunrises a day), all powered by a new in-house caliber with a 120-hour power reserve.
The case is white zirconium oxide ceramic with a Ceratanium bezel and back, rated to handle temperature swings from 100 to -100 degrees Celsius (212 to -238 Fahrenheit). Indeed, the whole piece has been shaken to 10 g’s at Vast's Long Beach facility, exceeding forces astronauts experience during ascent, and came out the other side running just fine. Price is still up in the air.
Courtesy of TAG Heuer
TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph (From $25,000)
Watch brands love finding ever more recherché areas to reinvent, and the precise “snick” of a chronograph’s stop/start/reset buttons is the latest micro-battlefield in which R&D teams are duking it out. Last year, Audemars Piguet took the feel of an iPhone button as the inspiration for its Royal Oak RD#5; now TAG Heuer has its own take on push-button ergonomics.
Normally, chronograph buttons involve a cluster of levers, springs, and cams that click into place with varying degrees of precision. TAG Heuer has thrown most of that out with the Calibre TH80-00, five years in development between its TAG Heuer LAB innovation department and movement maker Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier. It replaces the traditional architecture with two flexible bistable components—essentially shape-shifting parts that snap between positions—produced via high-precision LIGA fabrication, a micro-manufacturing technique that includes lithography, electroforming, and molding.
The result? Crisper actuation that, crucially, doesn't degrade. According to TAG, the 10,000th press feels identical to the first. Paired with TAG's incredibly high-tech TH-Carbonspring oscillator (magnetism-resistant, 5-Hz, 70-hour reserve, COSC-certified), it's housed in a reworked 40-mm titanium Monaco with the crown back on the left where Steve McQueen's 1969 original had it. You get two versions: brushed titanium with blue accents or black Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) with red. The dial is transparent acrylic, so you can watch the compliant mechanism do its thing.
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Courtesy of Vacheron
Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Cardinal Points (Price on Request)
Vacheron Constantin's Overseas line, among the most celebrated examples of Switzerland’s dominant "sports-luxe" genre, leans heavily into the sports side with a full-titanium, GMT-treatment across four references. Each dial is color-mapped to a compass point: white for north, brown for south, green for west, blue for east, contrasting with a bright orange, Rolex-style GMT hand for the time zone at home.
The lineage traces to a 2019 prototype built for explorer Cory Richards to wear up Everest—probably the most luxurious timepiece that has been to such places. The 41-mm case, integrated bracelet, and folding clasp are all in titanium with a matte anthracite finish on the bezel and crown. Inside is the in-house Calibre 5110 DT/3, a self-winding GMT with home-time am/pm indicator, local-time date pusher, and 60-hour reserve. Classic sports watch attributes, but here certified with the Geneva Hallmark, the highest official benchmark of fine watchmaking and hand-finishing.
Nothing here reinvents physics, but for a travel watch from a house usually associated with high complications, it's a credible piece of kit: light, legible, and really rather cool.
Courtesy of Ulysse Nardin
©Laurent Xavier Moulin / www.laurentxaviermoulin.chUlysse Nardin [Super] Freak (Limited to 50 Pieces)
Twenty-five years ago, Ulysse Nardin launched one of the more remarkable wristwatches ever made, which it suitably named the Freak: no crown, no hands, the entire movement rotating on the central axis to indicate the time, with parts made—for the first time in watchmaking—from silicone. That material has since proven so innovatory in watchmaking that Rolex’s grand reveal last year, the Land-Dweller, used silicone parts to deliver the brand’s most mechanically sophisticated timepiece.
Back to Ulysse Nardin, where the temptation to invoke the spirit of Rick James has finally been met, with the launch of the [Super] Freak, which it proclaims is the most complicated time-only watch ever made. Whether that’s a laudable or absurd achievement is very much in the eye of the beholder, but the watch presents no end of very out-there mechanical tech.
It's the world's first automatic double tourbillon—meaning two titanium flying tourbillons inclined 10 degrees, spinning in opposite directions, and averaged out by a 5-mm differential (the smallest ever made) and routed through a newly patented 4.8-mm gimbal system (also the smallest), borrowed conceptually—we’re told—from marine compasses and aerospace gyros. The hour disc is transparent Nanosital, a glass-ceramic engineered from silicon and aluminum oxides.
Courtesy of IWC
IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Ceralume (Limited to 250 Pieces)
Last year, IWC's research and development unit revealed something called Ceralume, a completely luminous form of ceramic, which it used for a concept watch worn for about five minutes by Lewis Hamilton. But now Ceralume has entered production for the Perpetual Calendar version of the brand’s Big Pilot’s Watch.
Ceralume is essentially white ceramic blended with Super-LumiNova pigments via a custom ball-milling process. The dial and rubber strap are loaded with the same pigment, so the entire watch—case, dial, strap, even the medallion on the winding rotor—charges up in daylight and emits a vivid blue glow for over 24 hours in the dark. In daylight, it’s simply white-on-white; kill the lights, and it becomes something else entirely, with the numerals appearing as dark silhouettes against a glowing dial. Good fun, but not the world’s first all-glowing wristwatch. That honor went recently to tiny British brand Split Watches. Much like Hamilton, IWC should have moved faster.
Courtesy of Bremont
Bremont Supernova Chronograph (From $8,000)
Bremont has spent two decades building tool watches for Air, Land, and Sea. The Supernova adds a fourth pillar: Space. It’s also a meaningful design departure for a brand whose DNA has skewed toward traditional aviation styles—this is an angular, unapologetically bold take on the integrated-bracelet blueprint, drawing its language from space stations and spacecraft both real and imagined. Oh, and one of them is going to the moon.
The 41-mm case is a geometric take on Bremont’s signature three-piece—or “Trip-Tick”—case architecture, in 904L steel with a DLC-coated middle section and a decahedral black ceramic bezel. But it’s the dial that is the showpiece: a three-dimensional latticework divided into 12 sections angling towards the center, with arrow-motif divides. Dedicated space-heads will recognise the look of solar arrays used by spacecraft like the Cygnus vehicle from Northrop Grumman, though in the watch’s case, the light comes from the other side. The dial overlays a full blue-emission Super-LumiNova base that glows out through the perforations in low light. Triangular indexes and rhomboidal black-gold hands echo the geometry. If you like your space watches still more otherworldly, Bremont is launching a skeletonized tourbillon version too.
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Courtesy of Hermes
Hermès H08 Skeleton
The Hermès H08 has been a WIRED favorite since it launched in 2021: a seamless blend of high-fashion DNA and everyday sports utility thanks to minimal design and water resistance to 100 meters. But, for 2026, the house is now stripping that design away. Three years in development, the new Squelette marks the collection’s first foray into the world of skeletonization—the process of removing as much metal as possible from a watch’s components, such as the plate, bridges, and oscillating weight, without compromising structural integrity. It also features a brand-new titanium Hermès movement with 60-hour power reserve developed in collaboration with Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier. Sporting a 39-mm black DLC titanium case with ceramic bezel, the Squelette ditches the date window to let the (lack of) mechanical interior steal the show.
