The watches that stopped us on day one of Watches & Wonders 2026
Geneva reclaims its place at the centre of the watchmaking world as Watches & Wonders 2026 opens its doors to another year of landmark novelties. Over the next few days, we will be bringing you the releases that matter most—drawn from the most venerated and exciting names in horology that have always set the pace.
In the first of three dispatches, Robb Report Singapore shares the watches that caught our attention on day one.
A. Lange & Söhne Saxonia Annual Calendar
Give me geometry, practicality, and dress suit-ready disposition, and you’ll find my credit card on your tray before you know it. The Saxonia Annual Calendar ticks all of the above boxes and, with a touch of technical sophistication sprinkled on top, it is making it really hard to decide between the white or pink gold version with grey dial.
It is a throwback offering, brimming with simple, yet assured elegance. The 36mm case is unobtrusive, yet ensures presence. Meanwhile, the dial is clean and legible—one where you can, at a glance, tell the time, day, date, month, and even the phase of the moon. Inside, the watch’s newly developed in-house automatic movement is a modern workhorse. Storing up to 60 hours of power reserve on a full wind, its finely orchestrated inner workings ensure that you only need to correct the calendar display only once a year (either from 28 February, or in a leap year from 29 February, to the first day of March)—and do so with minimal fuss via individual correctors or collectively with a pusher at 10 o’clock.
Chopard L’Heure du Diamant
Chopard takes us back to the 1960s with the latest addition to the L’Heure du Diamant collection, a tiny yet sensational retro-inspired beauty of a jewellery watch that will look right at home wrapped around a celebrity’s gloved wrist on Oscars night.
The dainty cushion-shaped case in 18k ethical white gold is set with 4.40 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds. Held in place with Chopard’s crown-setting, where V-shaped prongs maximise light penetration for unabated shine, the stones form a sparkling frame for the watch’s onyx dial. Carved from natural stone, no two onyx dials are ever identical. Against the raven backdrop, four diamond indexes anchor the cardinal hours, while the hour and minute hands, also set with brilliant-cut stones, ensure that every act of time-telling is a lavish affair.
IWC Schaffhausen Portofino Automatic Day & Night 34 Le Petit Prince
In yet another example of smaller-sized creations catching my eye, IWC’s Portofino Automatic Day & Night 34 Le Petit Prince, despite its characteristically diminutive proportion, is a heavyweight pleaser.
The watch marks IWC’s first Le Petit Prince edition within the Portofino collection, and the execution is classy and restrained. Powered by the automatic Calibre 35180 with 50-hour power reserve, the 34mm stainless steel case houses a navy dial with sunray finish, topped with gold-plated hands and appliqués. It is a fail-safe execution but even so, the timepiece demands a closer look. At 6 o’clock is a day-and-night disc that completes one full rotation every 24 hours: the sun at noon, the moon at midnight. And there, one finds the Little Prince himself standing on the latter, surveying the night sky. It is the kind of complication that functions as both a technical statement and a quiet homage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s enduring tale.
Roger Dubuis Excalibur Biretrograde Perpetual Calendar
Roger Dubuis is one of the few Manufactures that can make a perpetual calendar feel genuinely exciting. The complication itself is no-nonsense—it automatically computes and displays all the necessary calendar indicators with mechanical intelligence and in service of practicality. But with Roger Dubuis, a sense of theater is always present.
The new RD850 calibre runs bi-retrograde displays to animate the day and date indications, flanking an astronomical moonphase accurate to within one day every 122 years. Meanwhile, the 40mm pink gold case opens onto nine layers of dial architecture in a new Astral Blue colourway comprising aventurine and mother-of-pearl, with inner angle finishing on the retrograde bridges appearing 14 times across the movement. As it is with all Roger Dubuis creations, this watch comes with the prestigious Geneva Seal certification that rates elite-level horological craftsmanship, assembly, and performance.
Zenith G.F.J Bloodstone
Certainly, the bloodstone dial does it job effectively by stopping us in our tracks. Its marbled appearance, sheathed in shades of green from deep jade to light forest, and specked with rich crimson, commands attention—sitting at the centre of a three-part dial construction that also features a mother-of-pearl small-seconds counter at 6 o’clock, and a peripheral guilloché ring evoking the brick facade of Zenith’s Le Locle manufacture.
Housed in a 39.5mm yellow gold case, the G.F.J. is a watch that rewards intimate inspection. Equally justifying attention is what lies beneath. Zenith won 2,333 chronometry prizes over its history, and the Calibre 135 is responsible for five consecutive first prizes at the Neuchâtel Observatory between 1950 and 1954, a record that no other movement has since touched. Powering this 161-piece limited edition is a re-engineered version of the movement, now delivering 72 hours of power reserve, with a gear train running with greater efficiency, and a stop-second mechanism allows for precise time-setting.
Read our picks from day two.
