Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – both the fictional Guide and the actual books – are full of jolly good advice but the exhortation, “Don’t Panic” was especially apropos at Watches & Wonders 2025. The announcement of tariffs (which, apparently it must be said over and over again, are paid by the importer, not the exporter) against Switzerland had the effect which you might have expected; people were worried. I write this with the benefit of having seen, today, an announcement from the White House that tariffs will be paused for 90 days (whatever that means) which means at least a temporary reprieve for the Swiss watch industry and its trading partners here in the US market; I can only assume that the three month pause will give brands a chance to shift inventory into the US tout de suite lest the other shoe drop … again.

Tariffs aside there was plenty to talk about at Watches & Wonders which continues to grow. The show according to the show, had 55,000 visitors, 6,000 retailers, and sold 23,000 tickets for the public days; I was there for the first public day and it was cheek-by-jowl to get into the booths (reporting to a brand booth for a scheduled appointment on a public day can be met with incredulity, as if only a real noob would still be trying to attend group meetings when John Q Public was in the Palexpo with the spouse and the kids and the dog, but you do what you have to do). There is no doubt that by the numbers, the show was a roaring success and that the organizers should be popping corks, with the sound of effervescent champagne hitting innumerable coupes only slightly dampened by the smothering effects of the prospect of tariffs.

I don’t know why, but despite all the record-breaking numbers, it felt like an oddly muted show to me. There were two absolutely major pieces of news which stood out even among the fog of war produced by trying to digest the releases from some sixty brands and while many of the watch specialist publications did themselves proud in covering major hits from the most important brands, comprehensive coverage of any kind is simply physically impossible no matter the size of your team, or the degree to which those pubs with Most Favored Nation status have access to press material ahead of time.

Add to that the problem of covering the independents and you have an absolute perfect storm of unmanageable information overload. Time To Watches was present in the Villa Sarasin, which sits at the western end of the Palexpo center, up a daunting triple flight of stairs from the drop-off point for the shuttle busses running from hotels to the Palexpo and back. T to W had if you can believe it, over 70 exhibiting brands crammed into a villa originally built in 1833. The Villa Sarasin’s history is surprisingly obscure; certainly it predates the Palexpo, the first halls of which were inaugurated in 1981. I have not been able to find out much about the history of the Villa Sarasin other than indirect evidence that it may be connected to the Sarasin banking family. There is almost certainly an interesting story to be written about the Palexpo and the Villa Sarasin; the watch press have been going to the former since the days of the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie and the history of the Villa Sarasin, and how it ended up being attached to one end of the Palexpo like a remora to a whale shark, might make interesting reading as well. It is very easy to go to Geneva without realizing just how many secrets it keeps, even in the watch world (or perhaps especially in the watch world; although I suspect that when it comes to secrets, precious metal trading, private banking, and pharma make the watch industry look as open and guileless as Winnie the Pooh.

This is all by way of saying that Watches & Wonders should have felt like getting in to see Queen fronted by Freddy Mercury playing in an arena in 1978 and in past years, especially when Watches & Wonders was SIHH, the mood of irrational exhilaration was much more powerful than it was in 2025, in the post-COVID shadow and also in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, political chaos in the United States, general saber-rattling around the globe, and maybe most pertinently, a drop off in the Swiss watch industry’s exports, combined with the ongoing “premiumization” of prices. The word “premiumization” is really just a euphemism for price increases. The trend in Swiss watchmaking for some time, to increase prices, reduce production, and, wherever possible, reduce costs; this is the reason that we seen so many very expensive watches, with increasingly industrial processes behind producing them. You do what you have to when you are a publicly traded company, but if you are under pressure to show increase in margin every quarter your options are limited and one fast way to do it is to remove as many humans from the process as possible. This is a non-issue for the watch enthusiast on a non-multi-millionaire budget as such a collector can only afford industrial watchmaking anyway, and at the higher end, collectors able to afford five and six (and seven) figure watches may simply be able to ignore lapses in quality if they are even aware of them at all. A. J. Liebling once wrote that for someone trying to develop a real palate for food and wine, deep pockets may be an actual hindrance to developing taste because you can afford whatever the collective opinion says is “good” or “high quality” – we are at that point in fine watchmaking where the meme factor of a watch matters much more to its success than any of its watchmaking content.

That said, there were still the two big stories of Watches & Wonders, to wit the Rolex Land Dweller and the Vacheron Constantin Solaria. Both seem to have been simply beyond the ability of anyone to cover accurately and coherently, although this is not a knock against the general luxury press or enthusiast press; I don’t think that too many people writing about, say, perfume, are particularly aware of the neurophysiology of scent, for instance, or people writing about clothes conscious of what makes a fabric qualitatively superior. The news cycle for luxury is shortened these days to the lifespan of a mayfly, which doesn’t encourage either quality in production or quality in coverage.

Nonetheless, a new escapement, and the world’s newest record holder for most complicated watch, are an interesting litmus test for the ability of those of us covering them to offer something more in terms of insight, than the bullet points in press releases. The Land Dweller has I think been fairly dragged for the name, first of all. I forget who said this to me (I would like to claim it’s my own insight but it isn’t) but “Land Dweller” is a head-scratcher. Sky Dweller is for instance, an aspirational name; one aspires to dwell in the sky; Sea Dweller is an aspirational name redolent of the great age of manned exploration of the Deep which we have now ceded largely (and with good reason) to ROVs; one aspires to dwell in the Sea, like Aquaman or Neptune or Namor the Sub-Mariner. Nobody aspires to be a land dweller; we aspire to escape from being land dwellers; any chump who gets out of bed and puts their feet on the floor is a land dweller. Land dwellers are hoi polloi; land dwellers are short sighted, petty NIMBYs; land dwellers want to speak to your manager; land dwellers argue with the pizza delivery guy about whether or not their pizza’s late and they should get a freebie. All of this however is less interesting by far than the Dynapulse escapement, which is the first new escapement to be successfully industrialized (although what that term means is somewhat elastic) since Omega industrialized the co-axial and Grand Seiko, the high beat Dual Impulse escapement.

As a litmus test most of us failed. The first stories out almost universally characterized the Dynapulse as a direct impulse escapement, which it is not; many also characterized it as a variation of the Breguet “natural” escapement, which it is not. It is in its own way something much more interesting than either; the only watch specialist pub that got it right that I saw the first time, was SJX, who you can usually count on for technical accuracy. This is saying a lot these days. The trouble is that to cover the Dynapulse accuracy you have to first understand how a lever escapement works and what its problems are; then you have to know enough about actual natural escapements and their variants to understand that despite the two escape wheels, you’re not looking at a natural escapement and then you have to be able to puzzle out the very counterintuitive action of the Dynapulse. And then of course you have to know enough about high frequency escapements, their effect on power reserve, the fact that silicon has a brittle failure mode, and a host of other things besides, to be able to offer anything like an informed opinion on the Dynapulse. It doesn’t matter how great or small you are; technical accuracy is a meritocracy and I think we, the enthusiast press, blew it in our coverage; after the fact scrambling to cover up first outing goofs notwithstanding.

The second piece of big news was the Solaria from Vacheron Constantin. Let’s be honest, exceedingly complex astronomical complications do not come along often enough for most luxury writers and most watch writers to feel an incentive to understand naked eye astronomy enough to write accurately about something like the Solaria; you may not have a real grasp of the basics – of what the Equation of Time really means, much less things like the Point of Aires or solar declination or the precession of the Equinoxes; so most of the coverage of the Solaria was hand waving. This is all probably fine inasmuch as it’s enough to know that the watch has set a record and to list the complications; it’s like hearing a magickal incantation, you don’t need to know what it means to feel overawed by impressive terminology. Still, it’s a shame that we don’t work at it harder.

Beyond that, the show was as always, physically punishing and a lot more business and a lot less fun than in past years, when you could, for instance, go to an IWC event in an arena with what looked like half a thousand people and wonder whether the rotating prop of a working Spitfire sitting on the apron of a stage was going to decapitate a brand ambassador. There was a lot lost during COVID including human lives (which lest we forget is an acronym for Coronavirus Disease 2019) much more important than a frisson of pleasure at going to a nice dinner on a brand’s dime or staying at a five instead of a four star hotel; still, the present suffers by comparison with the past. However this is a universal problem during the Kali Yuga and those of us with expense accounts of any kind left should be grateful to have them at all. And I don’t think all the hand-wringing that went on at the show – albeit it was discreet hand-wringing – means that the Swiss watch industry is in an existential crisis; the Show Must Go On. And I went. A lot of us went. A lot of us were tickled pink to be there and to feel a part of the community of watch lovers; watches after all are still interesting. The truth is that for all that prices keep creeping up and quality keeps dumbing down, there are still a lot of people who are in the watch business who genuinely love watches and even people who want to offer real value for your stretched watch dollars.