Time as Performance

At Watches and Wonders Geneva 2026, Hermès reframes watchmaking as staged performance. French artist Jean-Simon Roch designed a kinetic installation — a towering wooden structure animated by ropes, pulleys, counterweights, and rotating wheels — that serves simultaneously as stage set and metaphor for the three new skeleton timepieces unveiled alongside it.

A Stage of Mechanics and Sound

Roch's installation functions as a large-scale automaton, continuously reconfiguring itself. Sculptor Gianpaolo Pagni's engraved equestrian figure gradually emerges through moving wooden panels, appearing and disappearing in a choreography that deliberately blurs the boundary between stage and backstage. The horse motif — central to Hermès iconography — acquires a temporal dimension here, revealed only in fragments as time passes.

Composer Pierre Ronin translated the mechanical rhythms of the installation into a composed soundscape, cyclical patterns shifting into lighter improvisations. The structure effectively becomes a resonant instrument, unifying motion and sound into a single temporal experience.

Three Novelties: Transparency as Language

Hermès introduced three skeleton timepieces at Geneva.

The Hermès H08 Squelette houses the new H1978 S skeletonized titanium caliber — 168 components, 60-hour power reserve — in a 39mm DLC-treated titanium cushion case. Interlocking gears and layered architecture render the movement as a kind of structural drawing.

The Arceau Samarcande revisits Henri d'Origny's 1978 Arceau design. A Saint-Louis crystal dial, openworked into a horse's head shape in blue or white, reveals the H1297 skeletonized caliber and its minute repeater mechanism beneath. The gong sounds time below the horse's starlit eye.

The Slim d'Hermès Squelette Lune pairs a moon phase complication with skeletonized movement, navigating between technical precision and poetic expression.

The Arc of Hermès Watchmaking

Hermès has produced watches since 1978 and deepened its investment in Haute Horlogerie from the mid-2000s, developing proprietary calibers through its Geneva-based La Montre Hermès atelier. This year's presentation is one of the clearest articulations yet of the maison's approach: time not as measurement, but as emotional and sensory space. The integration of scenography, sound, and skeletonized mechanics reflects a broader shift in luxury watchmaking toward experience-driven exhibition — where the watch is inseparable from the world it inhabits.