The watch world and its legion of followers found out on Tuesday which 84 timepieces are in the running for the 2026 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the industry’s top honour.
Spread across 14 categories, each of the shortlisted timepieces are truly remarkable. The nominees a Moscow workshop taking on the Swiss giants, a wearable solar system, and a 10-kilo clock that winds your watch while you sleep.
Each of the contenders will compete for one of the 19 prizes celebrating contemporary watchmaking creativity, including the prestigious ‘Aiguille d’Or’ Grand Prix.
The winners will be revealed at a glittering award ceremony in Geneva on Saturday 7 November and you can watch the event live on Euronews Culture. But, before then, here’s a look at some of the pieces that have captured our hearts and minds.
Konstantin Chaykin — ThinKing Mystery
Category: Mechanical Exception
Take two credit cards and stack them: 1.65 mm. That’s the thickness of this mechanical marvel, which happens to be wearing a mysterious little smile.
Maybe because while the big Swiss houses were busy fighting over the world’s-thinnest record, an independent watchmaker landed a serious blow from his workshop in Moscow. The ThinKing Mystery is billed as the thinnest series-produced mechanical watch in the world.
Let’s unravel the mystery: there is no watch inside the case. The case is the watch. It doubles as the movement’s mainplate. Two transparent sapphire discs display the time, and you never see what’s turning them. 12 pieces. €426,000.
Christiaan van der Klaauw — CVDK Grand Planetarium Eccentric Silicium
Category: Mechanical Exception
A walk under a starry sky will never feel quite the same once you’re wearing this. The eight planets of the solar system, hand-painted, light up on your wrist — each one exactly where it sits in the real sky.
The dial is made of iridescent oxidised silicon. The planets orbit across it in real time and at their true speed. Mercury laps the dial in three months. None of us will live to watch Neptune complete its orbit, which takes 165 years. The Dutch house already won the Calendar and Astronomy category in 2021. 6 pieces. €157,000.
Ulysse Nardin X Urwerk — UR-FREAK
Category: Complication
When two of the most explosive names in independent watchmaking finally get together, you end up with a watch that has neither hands nor a crown.
The Freak collection, launched in 2001 and already crowned in the Iconic category in 2023, tore up the rulebook: the entire movement rotates on itself and doubles as the hand.
Urwerk brings its house speciality, the satellite hours: cubes mounted on rotating arms, with the active figure travelling along the minute scale. The movement pivots every three hours around a silicon balance wheel. Two radical grammars in a single watch. It’s quite something to say the least. 100 pieces. €115,000.
L.Leroy — Vox Temporis
Category: Artistic Crafts
Napoleon, Marie-Antoinette and Proust all read the time on a watch from L.Leroy, pioneer of French haute horlogerie.
This one you don’t only look at. You listen to it. A single hand stays fixed while the dial turns beneath it to show the hour. The minutes are chimed: a minute repeater sounds them out loud. Hence the name, “the voice of time”.
Hidden beneath the case, a flying tourbillon improves accuracy. Above it, the rotating dial carries a flinqué soleil decoration finished with translucent dark blue varnish, under a hand-engraved hand. We’ve been touched. €341,000.
Louis Vuitton × De Bethune — LVDB-03 Sympathique Louis Varius
Category: Mechanical Clock
One GPHG category isn’t reserved for wristwatches. It’s well worth mentioning one of the competitors.
Imagine if your phone charger turned into a mechanical work of art. You get home, unclip the bracelet, drop your watch into its cradle. Overnight, the clock winds it and resets it to the right time. No electronics involved.
The mechanical wonder stands about 30 centimetres tall and weighs 10 kilos. On a titanium base inlaid with meteorite, three rose gold rings turn slowly around the structure. They’re hand-engraved after drawings by Belgian illustrator François Schuiten: a steam train on a viaduct, hot-air balloons over the African savannah, sherpas on a mountain face, all drifting past.
Behind the project: an alliance between French luxury giant Louis Vuitton, whose watchmaking arm sits just outside Geneva, and De Bethune, one of the most prestigious houses on the horological planet and already an ‘Aiguille d’Or’ winner. 2 pieces. €4,717,000, clock and watch together.
Grand Seiko — Spring Drive U.F.A. Ushio 300 Diver
Category: Sports
Twenty seconds. Whether you’re working, running or diving, that’s all this watch is allowed to gain or lose. Not per day, not per month. Per year.
Grand Seiko presents its first diver’s watch fitted with a U.F.A. movement, which the Japanese brand describes as the most accurate mainspring-powered movement ever made. The recipe: a quartz oscillator aged for three months to stabilise its precision.
Ushio means “tide” in Japanese — a nod to the waters surrounding the archipelago of the Land of the Rising Sun. The house was already a GPHG winner in 2021. €10,000.
IWC Schaffhausen — Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Ceralume®
Category: Sports
This one leads two lives. By day, a white pilot’s watch. By night, a glowing blue object. IWC blended ceramic powder with Super-LumiNova pigments to make the case itself. The result: the whole watch glows for more than 24 hours — the hands, the case, the dial, the strap.
Inside sits IWC’s well-known perpetual calendar, a legendary complication which knows the length of every month and every leap year, with no correction needed until 2100. The calendar shows the date, the day of the week, the month and the moon phases across four subdials. The movement offers a seven-day power reserve and can be admired through the sapphire crystal caseback. 250 pieces. €69,000.
SpaceOne × Baltic — Seconde Majeure
Category: Challenge
Is creative watchmaking reserved for six- and seven-figure pieces? The Challenge category, which honors more affordable models, says no.
Two Parisian brands sign the Seconde Majeure, built around a jumping hour module developed by Théo Auffret, a rising star of independent haute horlogerie. It works through three visible components: beneath the minute disc sits the Central Command Mobile, which makes a full rotation every 60 minutes. At the end of that rotation it engages the Hours Star, which is linked to the hours disc. Finally, the Jumper Spring makes the hour jump, once every 60 minutes.
The kind of beauty that usually costs 10 to 50 times more. €3,200.
The independents are on a roll
The 26th awards ceremony will take place on Saturday 7 November 2026 in Geneva. Every shortlisted timepiece is in the running for the coveted ‘Aiguille d’Or’ Grand Prix, awarded each year since 2001 to the most striking piece of the year.
Each autumn, the timepieces nominated by the Academy – and subsequently the winners – travel around the world as part of a series of exhibitions offering an unrivalled overview of contemporary watchmaking’s creativity.
The GPHG has set out to open the competition to a wider range of houses, from a wider range of countries, with a growing contingent of independents.
Several legendary names, on the other hand, aren’t competing at all. While Rolex has never participated, many of the missing brands are past winners: Patek Philippe, Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, F.P. Journe, Richard Mille, A. Lange & Söhne, Greubel Forsey, and Breguet, last year’s ‘Aiguille d’Or’.
The Olympics of watchmaking are going ahead without several of their record-holding stars. Which leaves the door wide open for the ones they did not see coming.