Style, Jewellery & Watch

Independent, Audacious, Precise: Louis Vuitton Announces 5 Watch Prize Finalists

Text by Magnifissance Magazine
Photos Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton, a house more readily associated with trunks than tourbillons, has once again turned its attention to the obsessive corners of horology. This week, it announced the five finalists for the second edition of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives, a distinction that has quickly become a kind of intellectual salon for watchmakers whose ambitions exceed the limits of mass production.

The prize, conceived as a counterweight to industrial watchmaking, advances a familiar but exacting idea: that the future of the mechanical watch depends less on efficiency than on imagination. Twenty semifinalists were scrutinized by a committee of collectors, industry veterans, and devoted amateurs, people who know, down to the micron, what distinguishes novelty from necessity. Each candidate was judged according to five criteria that function almost like a watchmaker’s credo: design, creativity, innovation, craftsmanship, and technical complexity. From this deliberative process emerged five finalists, each pursuing time in a markedly different way.

“Since the launch of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize, our admiration for the dynamism of independent watchmaking has continued to grow,” said Louis Vuitton Watch Director Jean Arnault, who views the wristwatch not as a solved problem but as an open question. “These artisans create truly audacious timepieces, uniting extraordinary technical mastery with the boldness to challenge convention, and in doing so, they push the very boundaries of what is possible.”

That openness is evident in the work of Daizoh Makihara, a Japanese watchmaker whose atelier operates at the intersection of mechanics and poetry. His selected piece, Beauties of Nature, incorporates an animated petal mechanism set against an Edo Kiriko cut-glass dial. The watch gestures toward traditional Japanese craftsmanship, but it does so without nostalgia; instead, it treats heritage as a living material, capable of motion and surprise.

Equally conceptually ambitious is Möbius, by Fam Al Hut, the brand founded by Xinyan Dai. Compact and manually wound, the watch dispenses with the conventional dial altogether. In its place is a paradox rendered in steel: a Möbius-shaped tourbillon cage paired with a double retrograde display and a jumping hour mechanism. The result is a timepiece that seems less concerned with telling time efficiently than with interrogating the very structure through which time is shown.

From France comes Hazemann & Monnin, a duo whose School Watch pays homage to the historic watchmaking school of Morteau. The watch unites an hourly chiming passing strike with an instantaneous jumping hour, the two mechanisms operating in carefully choreographed synchrony. It is, in effect, a lesson rendered audible, a reminder that education, like watchmaking, is built on repetition refined into precision.

Bernhard Lederer, a veteran of the independent scene, offers something closer to a technical manifesto. His 39 Racing Green is the first wristwatch to feature a fully functional dual detent escapement, regulated by twin remontoirs. The achievement is less visible than some of the others, but no less radical. It proposes that true innovation in horology may still reside in the invisible, deep within the movement, where fractions of a second are contested.

Rounding out the finalists is Quiet Club, founded by Norifumi Seki in Tokyo. Their watch, Fading Hours, introduces an alarm system unlike any before it: a vertical hammer that strikes the dial itself. Controlled by a single pusher and integrated displays, the mechanism collapses complexity into restraint. The alarm does not ring so much as announce itself, a subdued interruption in the passage of time.

The five finalists will present their projects to a jury at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in March of 2026. The eventual winner will receive not only a financial grant but a year-long mentorship tailored by experts from La Fabrique du Temps and Louis Vuitton.

In an age when time is increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize insists on a different tempo. It celebrates makers who still believe that progress can be measured in gears, springs, and ideas patiently refined by hand.