Our First Watches and Wonders

In 2025, we went to Watches and Wonders for the first time. Jaeger-LeCoultre had invited us as guests, with passes for the entire week, including the opening day. For anyone who has experienced Watches and Wonders, that first day is something special. It is primarily dealers and media, the halls are still relatively calm, and you have the rare opportunity to see the watches without the crowds and long lines that come later. When I say “we,” of course, I mean all three of us: Edi, Deni and Brion. At four and a half years old, our son was attending Watches and Wonders with us.

The excitement had actually begun the night before. We were at the hotel waiting for midnight, when the new releases would finally become public and we could see what Jaeger-LeCoultre had prepared. It turned out to be quite a year to make our first visit. Jaeger-LeCoultre had made 2025 a year of the Reverso, with one new interpretation after another, and we spent that evening looking through the releases and talking about which ones we wanted to see the following morning. There was one watch all three of us kept coming back to: the Reverso Tribute Geographic. On the front was a beautifully restrained dial with a large date, but turning the case over revealed the reason the watch had captured us. The reverse became a world-time display, with a map of the globe surrounded by the names of twenty-four cities.

There were two versions, and we genuinely struggled with the choice. The limited pink-gold version was beautiful, with its warm tones and darker world map, but there was something about the steel version that made sense to us. Its blue dial and blue globe gave it a completely different character, and I kept thinking that if we were going to own a world-time Reverso, perhaps it should actually be a watch we could travel with comfortably. Steel felt less formal and less conspicuous, something we could put on our wrist in another city and simply enjoy. Deni and I went back and forth on the metal we wanted, but Brion did not. He wanted the blue one. So the four-and-a-half-year-old member of our collecting committee cast the deciding vote.

That trip also took us beyond Geneva to the Jaeger-LeCoultre manufacture in the Vallée de Joux. For people who love watches, it is difficult to explain what it feels like to finally visit a place you have read about for years and then see the work happening in front of you. We met the people behind the watches and saw crafts that are almost impossible to appreciate fully from photographs. We met a young enamel artist, still in her twenties, who was working on one of the extraordinary miniature enamel paintings Jaeger-LeCoultre had created that year, inspired by the Shahnameh. Some of the details were being painted using a brush made with a single horsehair. Watching someone so young perform a craft requiring that degree of patience and control made us look at these watches differently. You can know intellectually that something is hand-painted, hand-finished or hand-made, but standing beside the person actually doing it gives those words an entirely different meaning.

By the end of the trip, the Geographic had come to represent much more than one of the watches introduced that year. It became our reminder of the whole experience: our first Watches and Wonders, our first visit to Geneva as a family, Brion walking the halls with us at four and a half years old, and our first journey into the Vallée de Joux and through the Jaeger-LeCoultre manufacture. It also unintentionally continued something we had started with our Reverso chronograph. Both were complicated Reversos, and both were in steel. Perhaps, over time, that will become a small collection of its own as Jaeger-LeCoultre introduces other complications. We will see. What we do know is that our original instinct about the Geographic was right: it has become our travel watch. Deni and I both wear it, and during our travels this past summer it spent months with us, alongside only a handful of other watches. It is complicated enough to be fascinating, practical enough to travel with, and in steel we never feel that we have to treat it as something too precious to actually use.

Whenever we turn the case over and see that blue globe, we remember why we chose it. Not simply because we wanted a world-time Reverso, but because it takes the three of us back to Geneva, to the Vallée de Joux, and to a week in 2025 when our little family experienced that world together for the first time.