Gucci occupies a fascinating and somewhat unusual position in the world of high watchmaking. It is, at its core, a fashion house, which means some observers will always arrive with their arms folded, waiting to be convinced that the watches are more than beautiful branding exercises. The 2026 Gucci watches make a compelling case for the sceptics. Unveiled at an off-fair event at The Woodward Hotel in Geneva, timed to coincide with Watches and Wonders 2026, the sixth high watchmaking collection from the Florentine house brings together featherwork, archival scarf motifs, micro-painting at a scale that strains the imagination, and a skeleton tourbillon draped in rainbow-colored baguette sapphires. Fashion house or not, this is serious watchmaking.
The collection centres on five pieces: four new additions to the G-Timeless Métiers d’Art family, each a 40mm tourbillon drawn from Gucci’s archive of iconic silk scarf designs, and a new iteration of the Gucci 25H skeleton—distinguished by a rainbow arrangement of baguette-cut sapphires framing an open-work dial with hand-set gemstones in graduated tones. Distinctive techniques, including miniature painting, featherwork, and enameling, are leveraged to spotlight the luxury brand’s recurring themes, spanning nature, wildlife, and movement. The result is a collection that, piece by piece, makes a genuinely convincing argument that the 2026 Gucci watches belong in the same conversation as the most technically ambitious high watchmaking produced this year.
The G-Timeless Métiers d’Art: Four Dials, One Archive
The four new timepieces, all in a 40mm size on alligator straps and boasting a tourbillon complication at 12 o’clock, are inspired by archival silk scarf designs, from the 1966 Flora, famously created by Vittorio Accornero for the brand, to the 1970s Animalia and other motifs Gucci introduced in the 1980s. Each dial is essentially a miniature painting, though that description undersells what has actually been achieved here.
The Flora Dial
Vittorio Accornero created the Flora print for Gucci in 1966, originally as a silk scarf for Grace Kelly. Sixty years later, it becomes the subject of a white gold tourbillon featuring micro-painting, hand engraving, and individually set minerals to recreate its fluid botanicals on an onyx dial base. Pink opal, blood jasper, and mother-of-pearl are each inlaid separately, refined by laser, and finished by hand. The case is set with diamonds on the bezel and lugs, matched by the diamond frame encircling the tourbillon.
In a detail that tells you exactly how deep the craft runs here, the case carries miniature white gold creatures—a grasshopper and a dragonfly—rendered with fine engraving and micro-painting at a scale that makes you pause and think about what the people who do this work can actually see. It is, by some distance, one of the most technically complex watch dials produced in Geneva this year.
The Featherwork Dials
Two of the four 2026 Gucci watches were developed in partnership with French artist Nelly Saunier, known for her inlay designs with feathers collected exclusively during birds’ natural molting. Both share a diamond-set case and are offered in rose gold and white gold, respectively, and both need to be seen in person to be believed.
The rose gold version features a crane rendered in rose gold plumage over Grand Feu enamel, a combination of featherwork and one of the most demanding enameling techniques in the industry, applied to a dial smaller than a two-euro coin. The white gold version takes a different chromatic approach: a mother-of-pearl dial with feathers in a gradient of blue, shifting from aquamarine to navy and forming the background for a toucan and green foliage done in engraved and overpainted mother-of-pearl. The tourbillon at 12 o’clock is adorned with a tiny fuchsia flower in micro-painted mother-of-pearl, an unexpected accent that lifts the whole composition. The toucans are cut from mother-of-pearl and hand-painted on both faces, a detail that only the maker and the collector who thinks to turn the piece in the light will ever fully appreciate.
The Animalia Dial
The fourth Métiers d’Art piece reaches into Gucci’s late 1970s archive for the Animalia scarf motif, and the result is arguably the most cohesive of the four. A hand-painted rose gold tiger prowls through hand-painted foliage across a mother-of-pearl dial, where micro-painting evokes a blazing sun dissolving into haze beneath the surface. The natural iridescence of the mother-of-pearl becomes part of the composition rather than a neutral background. A hand-engraved bamboo accent in rose gold, a callback to the house’s archive, and a diamond-set star on the tourbillon at twelve complete a piece in which every element returns to a Gucci reference. It is the 2026 Gucci watch that rewards the most patient-looking.
The Gucci 25H: Rainbow Sapphires Meet Skeleton Watchmaking
If the Métiers d’Art pieces are about the art on the dial, the new Gucci 25H is about the mechanics beneath it. Previous iterations of the 25H have always carried horological credibility thanks to its amphitheatre silhouette, the ultra-thin 8.4mm case, and a skeletonised movement that treats the mechanics as decoration rather than concealing them. The 2026 version retains all of that and adds the drama of rainbow-colored baguette sapphires, each selected for shade and set by hand in graduated tones around the open-work dial.
The new 40mm iteration of the 25H features a thinner case frame compared to the original, with rainbow-colored, baguette-cut sapphires decking the open-work dial and framing the skeletonized movement within. The effect is exactly what you would hope for: a watch whose movement is fully on display, its bridges and plates visible through the open-worked dial, while a ring of hand-graduated sapphires in every shade from violet through blue, green, yellow, and red turns the whole thing into something closer to a piece of jewelry than a conventional timepiece. The ultra-thin 40mm timepiece retains its architectural silhouette while framing an open-work dial with hand-set gemstones in graduated tones, emphasizing both mechanical complexity and visual impact.
It is a different kind of spectacle from the Métiers d’Art dials—less about archival storytelling and artisanal painting, more about the pure visual drama of an extraordinary movement dressed in color. Both approaches work. Together, they make the 2026 Gucci watches the most compelling high watchmaking collection the house has produced.
Why This Collection Matters
Gucci’s high watchmaking journey began in 2021 with the launch of its first exclusive calibre, and each subsequent collection has pushed further in technical ambition, in artisanal complexity, and in the seriousness with which the house treats the medium. The 2026 Gucci watches represent a genuine step forward. A French feather artist working with naturally molted plumage. A 1966 silk scarf design recreated in onyx, pink opal, blood jasper, and mother-of-pearl at a scale requiring laser refinement. A skeleton tourbillon ringed in hand-selected rainbow baguette sapphires. These are not the choices of a fashion house playing at watchmaking. They are the choices of a house that has decided, with some conviction, that it belongs in this conversation and is willing to do the work to prove it. On the evidence of what arrived in Geneva this year, that case is becoming harder to argue with.
All images: Courtesy of Gucci
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