From Victoria Beckham’s Breitling collab to Tamara Ralph’s Audemars Piguet designs, female fashion designers are reshaping women’s watch trends

“I’ve always loved a men’s watch, the weight of it, the hardware,” she says. “But men’s watches can be too big.” So Beckham has designed something with the same look and feel but a little smaller. The resulting limited edition watch is the Chronomat 36 Victoria Beckham, to which she has brought bold colours – the palette of her spring/summer 2024 collection, including peppermint, midnight blue, dover grey and sand – new materials and subtle details including a yellow gold case.

Audemars Piguet turned to London-based haute couturier Tamara Ralph to give its famous Gerald Genta-designed Royal Oak a feminine spin. Their partnership began in 2020 but the new watch is the first to emerge from the union. “I approached the design in much the same way as I would a piece of couture given both require enormous attention to detail and painstaking technique,” explains Ralph, who is returning to the catwalk after parting ways with her former business partner Michael Russo.

“I ended up sketching at least 50 designs for this piece and from there narrowed it down.” The resulting Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon, which appeared on Ralph’s Paris catwalk in January, features a 3D-like dial in concentric circles of brown, bronze and gold with a frosted finish in a pink gold case that, she says, “captures the essence of both our brands, with an element of fresh modernity”.

It is the couturier’s first watch, which Yin admits was a challenge. “I was confronted with the unprecedented technical constraints of watchmaking, seeking to find a point of convergence with my artistic process,” she says – hence the pleats. “Experimentation has always been my guiding principle and I try to provoke encounters between different worlds.”

This she also achieves in the concept watch Pleats of Time, which takes her design further by drawing on the skills of master perfumer Dominique Ropion to create a dedicated fragrance, encapsulated in the strap and released by the wave of a hand.