Watches and Wonders 2024: Kylian Mbappé and Gisele Bündchen bring the star power to Geneva, while top brands IWC, Piaget and Jaeger-LeCoultre unveil the year’s hottest luxury timepieces

Apr 16 , 2024

Watches and Wonders in Geneva brought together the leading names in watchmaking from April 9-15, as well as A-list watch ambassadors like Hublot’s Kylian Mbappé and IWC’s Gisele Bündchen. Photo: WWGF/Keystone

Watches and Wonders 2024 went big on celebrities for 2024, with Bündchen repping IWC and Mbappé for Hublot, while K-pop idol Lee Jun-ho visited with Piaget, and Chinese star Jackson Yee was in town for Jaeger-LeCoultre.

More than 49,000 visitors turned out to see the latest creations from 54 top brands – here’s Style’s report direct from the world’s biggest timepiece spectacle

For retailers, brands, makers, enthusiasts, collectors and fans, all eyes were on Geneva this past week, where the 2024 edition of Watches and Wonders took place at Palexpo. An impressive 54 maisons presented the latest horological wonders at the world’s biggest watch fair, which wrapped its weeklong run yesterday.

“Our mission is to promote watchmaking worldwide, to showcase the industry with one voice – 54 brands speaking together,” said Matthieu Humair, CEO of the Watches and Wonders Geneva Foundation. “We want to go further and stronger.”

Visitors walk the Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva, Switzerland on April 9. Photo: Reuters

The fair comes at a pivotal moment for Switzerland, as midway through its run the country’s lawmakers voted to preserve neutrality amid bubbling tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine. Meanwhile Swiss banks will henceforth face tighter regulation in the wake of UBS’s takeover of Credit Suisse, after the latter’s collapse last year.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses for the watch industry either. Reports indicated that through the latter half of 2023, demand for pre-owned pieces from brands like Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe cooled. Auction sales dropped 13 per cent in 2023, per Bloomberg. And while watch exports for the country grew by 7.6 per cent on 2022, growth slowed to 3.6 per cent in the second half of the year – from 11.8 per cent in the first – according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. It felt to many that the watch industry’s post-pandemic boom is over.

Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen at Watches and Wonders in Geneva, Switzerland on April 9. Photo: WWGF/Keystone

Despite all this, spirits were certainly high in Geneva, with fairgoers from around the world gathering to see some of the biggest releases of the year. Helping fuel the fuss were a galaxy of stars: model Gisele Bündchen appeared with IWC, Hublot welcomed football star Kylian Mbappé, South Korean heartthrob Lee Jun-ho visited with Piaget and Chinese actor/model Jackson Yee greeted fans at Jaeger-LeCoultre.

Hublot ambassador footballer Kylian Mbappé launches the official Euro 2024 watch, a Bang Bang model, at Watches and Wonders Geneva. Photo: WWGF/Keystone

“When we see the traffic, we don’t feel a slowdown at Watches and Wonders,” Humair observed, noting a 20 per cent increase in first-day visitors compared to last year. “Each brand has its own strategy but it’s exciting in terms of creativity. It’s very dynamic – especially when there is a difficult period, events like Watches and Wonders Geneva are really necessary.”

Chinese actor Jackson Yee at Watches and Wonders in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 11. Photo: Handout