Watches & Wonders 2026 was a quieter affair compared to previous years in terms of outright horological bravura. There was less of the sense that each brand needed to outdo the last with something ground-breaking or record-setting. Even so, there were two or three watches of genuine technical significance that stood out, as well as a few others that felt newly compelling in their latest guises.

The single most significant development was the TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph. It is a milestone for TAG Heuer, but also one of those infrequent moments in the history of chronograph design when something can genuinely be considered revolutionary. There have been a handful of chronographs over the years that set out to rethink the complication, but more often than not, they arrive there by way of added complexity that feels, in the end, disproportionate to what was actually achieved. This is the opposite. The mechanism is reduced to two bi-stable compliant structures and a couple of levers, actuated directly by the pushers. There is no column wheel or cam, and none of the usual proliferation of springs, levers and their articulated joints that require delicate fine tuning. The result is a chronograph that is simpler, more robust and more efficient, with a consistently smooth, repeatable action.

TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph (©Revolution)

The second is the Patek Philippe Celestial Sunrise and Sunset Ref. 6105G, which made an already exotic astronomical complication even more exotic by enabling its display to be corrected for DST. The solution was notably elegant and ingenious. The date disk doubles as the scale for sunrise and sunset, and the mechanism allows the hour hand, the date pointer and the date disk to be shifted in concert when accounting for DST. For instance, when the watch is advanced by one hour for summer time, the hour hand jumps forward, the date disk moves by one day to serve as the scale for sunrise and sunset, while the date pointer moves back by one day to realign with the correct date on the disk. The feelers, racks and springs for the annual cams were also consolidated into a single monolithic complaint structure. Yet the watch had me before any of that had time to register, and for what it’s worth, I rather like the space-age case as well.

Patek Philippe Celestial Sunrise and Sunset Ref. 6105G (©Revolution)

For entirely different reasons, another watch I thought was simply magnificent was the Ferdinand Berthoud Mesure du Temps 1787 Chronomètre FB 2TV. It is a mega watch with a new inverted movement that’s been engineered and finished to an exhaustive degree. Yet there is very little in there that would traditionally be called a complication; almost everything in the watch sits at the level of the going train — fusée-and-chain, maintaining power via a differential, double stopwork, cone-driven power reserve indicator, flying tourbillon, hacking and zero-reset seconds. It is a portable museum of chronometric solutions all brought together and executed in a manner that can’t be found anywhere else.

Ferdinand Berthoud Mesure du Temps 1787 Chronomètre FB 2TV (©Revolution)

The next watch is priced to profligacy, but to see it is to love. The A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “Lumen” may well be the most beautiful Lumen yet. The movement is impressively engineered and combines two complications that are themselves unusual — a tourbillon with stop seconds, and an instantaneous perpetual calendar with a peripheral month ring — all within the iconic Lange 1 design, now gloriously luminous. It has a reworked gear train and a beautifully integrated day/night display. Best of all, the cocks for the tourbillon and intermediate wheel are in black-polished steel in this watch, while their opposite ends are hand-engraved with stars.

A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “Lumen” (©Revolution)

Last but never least is the Grand Seiko ‘Ushio’ 300m Diver Spring Drive UFA. It brings together what many have long hoped for — a more compact and better proportioned case, an industry-standard 300m depth rating, sans date, and a vastly improved clasp with a security lock and micro-adjustment feature that proves far more useful in everyday wear. The dial work remains exemplary, and crucially, it has been bestowed with a UFA movement — the new Caliber 9RB1 — which brings a new standard of precision to the realm of dive watches.

Grand Seiko ‘Ushio’ 300m Diver Spring Drive UFA (©Revolution)