Every April, as storied brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe and TAG Heuer bring grand exhibitions to Geneva for Watches and Wonders, a smattering of smaller, younger watch brands present themselves around the city, often in hotel suites where they take meetings, host modest soirees and show their wares.
This year, with their usual room at the five-star Beau-Rivage Genève unavailable, a cadre of like-minded brands lost the space they had rented together for the past few years. Rather than simply find a new hotel, the heads of Baltic Watches, Nivada Grenchen, SpaceOne, Furlan Marri and Atelier Wen decided to start their own watch fair.
The founding group eventually handed the project off to the youthful Geneva-based communications agency Apresdemain.
“We came up with a lot of bad names and bad concepts. We needed to find someone more creative,” explains Guillaume Laidet, the chief executive of Nivada Grenchen and Vulcain, as well as co-founder of SpaceOne.
“I think they were the right choice,” Robin Tallendier, co-founder of Atelier Wen said of Apresdemain, “because, as you know, their vibe is actually very cool, very modern, very avant-garde.”
When Apresdemain presented its initial concepts for the fair, the Chronopolis theme jumped out. “We said, ‘Wow!’ It was bingo,” Mr. Laidet said. “We wanted to have this cool energy.”
“Chronopolis” is a 1982 experimental stop-motion film from the Polish filmmaker Piotr Kamler without dialogue and with an atonal electronic score by the French avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari. In the film, powerful immortals who inhabit a vast city in the sky grow bored with eternity and create time itself, represented by a sentient white orb. The film has become a cult classic.
The team at Apresdemain brought in the young Swiss designer Tom Ducarouge to bring the otherworldly aesthetic of the film to the interior of the fair, which opens daily to the public from Tuesday to Saturday in the Halles de l’Île, a former slaughterhouse turned large-scale brasserie on a man-made island in the Rhône River.
“It’s not your typical stiff and arrogant luxury vibe,” Mr. Tallendier said of Chronopolis, noting that the 20 participating watch brands were not beholden to “the same constraints or paradigms” as more established brands. “The discourse is not rooted in history, or like, this is all heritage,” he said.
Instead, he described Chronopolis as “a scene for the new wave of horology.”
Many of the brands participating got to know each other at other watch fairs, particularly the Windup Watch Fair started by the Brooklyn-based publication Worn & Wound more than a decade ago.
Windup now includes four annual editions, held in Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, each with lines of watch enthusiasts wrapped around the block to get in.
Speaking of Windup, Etienne Malec, founder of Baltic Watches, said that Chronopolis has “kind of the same spirit, because the brands that you find over there have this common strategy and common energy. There’s no big brands. It’s mostly young brands, independent.”
It has been harder for such brands to reach into Switzerland, however. Gabriel Vachette of the Parisian watch brand Serica, which sells around 5,000 watches per year, said: “We’re very excited to be able to present Serica on the Swiss market. It’s the first time we have a good opportunity to do so with Chronopolis.”
The founders of the fair each mentioned the importance of community at Chronopolis.
“Watchmaking is obviously a community, a universe of passionate people who like to connect, to share their passion,” said Maëna Le Gat, project and communications coordinator for Furlan Marri, which launched on Kickstarter in 2021. “I think that’s what Chronopolis is all about, community.”
Every presentation booth at Chronopolis will be identical in size, style and price, offering participating brands equal exposure while also uniting the avant-garde aesthetic of the fair itself. This configuration will stand in contrast to Watches and Wonders, where brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe often erect multistory constructions of their own design.
“One thing which is pretty funny, which is important to mention, I think, is that Watches and Wonders were curious about our project,” said Mr. Malec, “and they are really looking forward to checking out what we are doing.”
He continued, “I don’t know whether it’s a good sign or not, but it’s always interesting to see that the biggest player in town is actually looking at what we are doing.”
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