The case is white zirconium oxide ceramic with a Ceratanium bezel and back, rated to handle temperature swings from 100 to -100 degrees Celsius (212 to -238 Fahrenheit). Indeed, the whole piece has been shaken to 10 g’s at Vast's Long Beach facility, exceeding forces astronauts experience during ascent, and came out the other side running just fine. Price is still up in the air.

TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph (From $25,000)

Watch brands love finding ever more recherché areas to reinvent, and the precise “snick” of a chronograph’s stop/start/reset buttons is the latest micro-battlefield in which R&D teams are duking it out. Last year, Audemars Piguet took the feel of an iPhone button as the inspiration for its Royal Oak RD#5; now TAG Heuer has its own take on push-button ergonomics.

Normally, chronograph buttons involve a cluster of levers, springs, and cams that click into place with varying degrees of precision. TAG Heuer has thrown most of that out with the Calibre TH80-00, five years in development between its TAG Heuer LAB innovation department and movement maker Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier. It replaces the traditional architecture with two flexible bistable components—essentially shape-shifting parts that snap between positions—produced via high-precision LIGA fabrication, a micro-manufacturing technique that includes lithography, electroforming, and molding.

The result? Crisper actuation that, crucially, doesn't degrade. According to TAG, the 10,000th press feels identical to the first. Paired with TAG's incredibly high-tech TH-Carbonspring oscillator (magnetism-resistant, 5-Hz, 70-hour reserve, COSC-certified), it's housed in a reworked 40-mm titanium Monaco with the crown back on the left where Steve McQueen's 1969 original had it. You get two versions: brushed titanium with blue accents or black Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) with red. The dial is transparent acrylic, so you can watch the compliant mechanism do its thing.

Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Cardinal Points (Price on Request)

Vacheron Constantin's Overseas line, among the most celebrated examples of Switzerland’s dominant "sports-luxe" genre, leans heavily into the sports side with a full-titanium, GMT-treatment across four references. Each dial is color-mapped to a compass point: white for north, brown for south, green for west, blue for east, contrasting with a bright orange, Rolex-style GMT hand for the time zone at home.

The lineage traces to a 2019 prototype built for explorer Cory Richards to wear up Everest—probably the most luxurious timepiece that has been to such places. The 41-mm case, integrated bracelet, and folding clasp are all in titanium with a matte anthracite finish on the bezel and crown. Inside is the in-house Calibre 5110 DT/3, a self-winding GMT with home-time am/pm indicator, local-time date pusher, and 60-hour reserve. Classic sports watch attributes, but here certified with the Geneva Hallmark, the highest official benchmark of fine watchmaking and hand-finishing.

Nothing here reinvents physics, but for a travel watch from a house usually associated with high complications, it's a credible piece of kit: light, legible, and really rather cool.

Ulysse Nardin [Super] Freak (Limited to 50 Pieces)

Twenty-five years ago, Ulysse Nardin launched one of the more remarkable wristwatches ever made, which it suitably named the Freak: no crown, no hands, the entire movement rotating on the central axis to indicate the time, with parts made—for the first time in watchmaking—from silicone. That material has since proven so innovatory in watchmaking that Rolex’s grand reveal last year, the Land-Dweller, used silicone parts to deliver the brand’s most mechanically sophisticated timepiece.

Back to Ulysse Nardin, where the temptation to invoke the spirit of Rick James has finally been met, with the launch of the [Super] Freak, which it proclaims is the most complicated time-only watch ever made. Whether that’s a laudable or absurd achievement is very much in the eye of the beholder, but the watch presents no end of very out-there mechanical tech.

It's the world's first automatic double tourbillon—meaning two titanium flying tourbillons inclined 10 degrees, spinning in opposite directions, and averaged out by a 5-mm differential (the smallest ever made) and routed through a newly patented 4.8-mm gimbal system (also the smallest), borrowed conceptually—we’re told—from marine compasses and aerospace gyros. The hour disc is transparent Nanosital, a glass-ceramic engineered from silicon and aluminum oxides.

IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Ceralume (Limited to 250 Pieces)

Last year, IWC's research and development unit revealed something called Ceralume, a completely luminous form of ceramic, which it used for a concept watch worn for about five minutes by Lewis Hamilton. But now Ceralume has entered production for the Perpetual Calendar version of the brand’s Big Pilot’s Watch.

Ceralume is essentially white ceramic blended with Super-LumiNova pigments via a custom ball-milling process. The dial and rubber strap are loaded with the same pigment, so the entire watch—case, dial, strap, even the medallion on the winding rotor—charges up in daylight and emits a vivid blue glow for over 24 hours in the dark. In daylight, it’s simply white-on-white; kill the lights, and it becomes something else entirely, with the numerals appearing as dark silhouettes against a glowing dial. Good fun, but not the world’s first all-glowing wristwatch. That honor went recently to tiny British brand Split Watches. Much like Hamilton, IWC should have moved faster.

Bremont Supernova Chronograph (From $8,000)

Bremont has spent two decades building tool watches for Air, Land, and Sea. The Supernova adds a fourth pillar: Space. It’s also a meaningful design departure for a brand whose DNA has skewed toward traditional aviation styles—this is an angular, unapologetically bold take on the integrated-bracelet blueprint, drawing its language from space stations and spacecraft both real and imagined. Oh, and one of them is going to the moon.

The 41-mm case is a geometric take on Bremont’s signature three-piece—or “Trip-Tick”—case architecture, in 904L steel with a DLC-coated middle section and a decahedral black ceramic bezel. But it’s the dial that is the showpiece: a three-dimensional latticework divided into 12 sections angling towards the center, with arrow-motif divides. Dedicated space-heads will recognise the look of solar arrays used by spacecraft like the Cygnus vehicle from Northrop Grumman, though in the watch’s case, the light comes from the other side. The dial overlays a full blue-emission Super-LumiNova base that glows out through the perforations in low light. Triangular indexes and rhomboidal black-gold hands echo the geometry. If you like your space watches still more otherworldly, Bremont is launching a skeletonized tourbillon version too.

Hermès H08 Skeleton

The Hermès H08 has been a WIRED favorite since it launched in 2021: a seamless blend of high-fashion DNA and everyday sports utility thanks to minimal design and water resistance to 100 meters. But, for 2026, the house is now stripping that design away. Three years in development, the new Squelette marks the collection’s first foray into the world of skeletonization—the process of removing as much metal as possible from a watch’s components, such as the plate, bridges, and oscillating weight, without compromising structural integrity. It also features a brand-new titanium Hermès movement with 60-hour power reserve developed in collaboration with Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier. Sporting a 39-mm black DLC titanium case with ceramic bezel, the Squelette ditches the date window to let the (lack of) mechanical interior steal the show.

Rolex Oyster Perpetual "100 Years" Rolesor ($9,650)

Much was speculated about what Rolex would do for the centenary of the Oyster case; many hoped for a return of the Milgauss, but Rolex rarely does nostalgia. Instead, we get this far more subdued Oyster Perpetual with a two-tone Rolesor (Rolex's term for its half gold, half steel watches) configuration pairing an Oystersteel case and bracelet with an 18-carat yellow gold bezel and crown—a nod to the 1950s reference 6582 “Zephyr”—over a new slate gray sunray dial. At six o'clock, "Swiss Made" has been replaced with "100 Years" and the crown carries a small engraved "100" that most will never notice. That's it. After 100 years, you'd think even Rolex would want to shout a little louder.

Rolex Oyster Perpetual "Jubilee Dial" ($6,750)

The decidedly sober "100 Years" Rolesor makes this bright "Jubilee Dial" Rolex seem like it's having all the fun. Rolex has done bold dials before, but this is possibly its most graphic yet. The monochrome steel case only makes the dial hit harder: a repeating, crossword-like pattern of the letters R-O-L-E-X rendered in 10 colors and created through a complex, multi-stage pad printing process. Up close, it reads as a structured typographic pattern; at a distance, it merges into a cloud of color. Legibility takes a back seat here, but for a bright, entry-level Oyster Perpetual at $6,750, we think many won't care. The real impediment to ownership won't be the price; it'll be getting hold of one.

Tudor Black Bay Ceramic ($7,725)

Tudor’s Black Bay Ceramic takes the brand’s much-admired dive-watch formula and strips it down into something moodier, sleeker, and a little more high-tech. The 41-mm matte black ceramic case gives it a stealthy presence, but the real trick is how the brand has managed to engineer the bracelet entirely from ceramic as well, which means this wears much lighter than a stainless steel diver. The off-white indices, snowflake hands, and domed dial keep the legibility sharp, while the no-date layout preserves minimal aesthetic. Even the lume is dark in tone. Inside, Tudor backs up the design with its in-house METAS-certified MT5602-U movement, good for 70 hours of power reserve when not worn.

Patek Philippe Celestial Sunrise and Sunset ($437,610)

This year’s ubiquitous astronomical theme continues with a new edition of Patek Philippe’s most high-flown watch, the Celestial, in which a starry night sky—configured exactly for the northern hemisphere, and calibrated to Geneva’s latitude—makes a real-time turn around the dial. At any given moment, the portion of the sky framed within the elliptical window superimposed above the dial shows the visible skyscape, should you look up from that latitude on a cloudless night, including the orbit and phases of the moon. This trick is achieved via a trio of superimposed see-through disks—two in mineral glass, and one in metallized sapphire glass.

The new version, Reference 6105G-001, adds indications for the sunrise and sunset, for which the peripheral date display doubles up as a 5 am to 11 pm scale. Nothing here is understated. The platinum case, with a sculpted architectural form that lends this Celestial a distinctly contemporary edge, is—at 47 mm—as monumental as the price. As Oscar Wilde would say, “I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”