Bold colours, materials and technical nous: Hublot’s LVMH Watch Week releases

Hublot has announced details of eight new watches launching at LVMH Watch Week 2025, from a serpentine chronograph to a vibrant green sapphire-cased tourbillon.

True to form, the brand’s first launches of the new year come big, bold and plentiful in number. Between them they manage to touch on everything we know and expect from Hublot: mechanical intricacy, impactful colour and decoration, and otherworldly materials.

Starting with the most timely – as the Lunar New Year, often also referred to as the Chinese New Year, will be celebrated on 29 January 2025 – we have the Hublot Spirit of Big Bang Year Of The Snake edition. Hublot has marked the last four lunar new years with limited-edition watches, each themed around the animal associated with that year under the Chinese zodiac system. As 2025 ushers in the year of the snake, Hublot takes the opportunity to coil a gold-coated snake around the chronograph subdials of a Spirit of Big Bang, which has also had its ceramic case and rubber strap embossed with reptilian scales.

The 42mm watch – which is almost entirely monochrome, apart from the rose gold hour markers, hands and snake – sits alongside three other Spirit of Big Bang debutantes. These draw on Hublot’s commitment to creating colourful ceramic alloys; these shades of beige, green and blue have all previously been available in the round-cased Big Bang, and are now available on the Big Bang’s tonneau-shaped cousin. Each watch, including the Year Of The Snake Edition, runs on Hublot’s HUB4700 chronograph movement, which is a repurposed version of sister brand Zenith’s El Primero 3600. As such, it beats at 5Hz, enabling measurements down to a tenth of a second. All three ceramic models are limited to 200 pieces; the Year Of The Snake model will be an edition of 88 pieces.

Another material that Hublot is revisiting for 2025 is SAXEM, a proprietary form of solid sapphire crystal. Standing for sapphire, aluminium oxide and rare earth mineral, SAXEM introduces colour at a scale and sturdiness that would be impossible with pure gemstones, by virtue of adding trace quantities of rare earth elements. SAXEM was first used in the Big Bang collection in 2023, and this edition adds a rich emerald green to the library of possibilities.

The movement inside is Hublot’s in-house automatic tourbillon calibre, featuring a one-minute tourbillon at six o’clock with a 72-hour power reserve. Only 18 pieces will be made.

Last but not least, Hublot has revamped its Meca-10 movement for use inside a smaller watch, giving us the Big Bang Meca-10 42mm. For the uninitiated, the Meca-10 is a hand-wound calibre first seen in 2016 that reorganised the layout of a traditional watch movement along angular, simple lines reminiscent of Meccano, while at the same time vastly improving efficiency and power reserve. The watch can run for more than ten days on a full wind; Hublot says it caps the power reserve officially at ten days because after that, daily accuracy can suffer. The power reserve is displayed on the skeletonised barrel at three o’clock, with a digital display that shows the number of days remaining. Previous watches using the Meca-10 calibre were either 45mm Big Bang or Spirit of Big Bang models; now the brand has re-engineered the movement to fit in a 42mm watch.

The watch launches in three variants, cased in titanium, 18ct King Gold (a proprietary alloy of Hublot’s chosen for its warm tone and brilliance) and a material that Hublot calls ‘frosted carbon’, similar in appearance to forged carbon, wherein layers of carbon-fibre-reinforced-polymer are cut to give an organic look. As a brand whose marketing activities sometimes threaten to overshadow its technical prowess, Hublot’s more colourful releases may get the lion’s share of the limelight, but the Meca-10 is proof that the brand is serious about its own very particular approach to horology.

hublot.com

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