WatchTime New York, the collector show run by WatchTime magazine, held its 11th edition at Gotham Hall in Midtown Manhattan from October 16 to 18. It was the biggest yet, with 3,000 visitors and 48 brands over three days, up from 2,700 and 44 a year earlier.
Gotham Hall makes a fine stage for it. The building opened in 1924 as the Greenwich Savings Bank, and the show filled both levels: with the old banking floor under its domed skylight and the mezzanine above.
When I was there, the crowd set the tone. The hall had numerous six-figure watches on display and to be touched, people were easygoing and polite, and a lot of fathers had brought their children to share the passion.
Watchmakers, Collectors and Ryan Reynolds
A full house for one of the weekend’s talks on the show floor.
Passing the passion on is one thing, and Saturday morning’s panel, “Why We Collect,” asked where it starts. The Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds took the collector’s seat beside MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser, the man who builds the kind of watches people like Reynolds collect. Aldis Hodge, an actor, collector and watchmaker himself, moderated as the three traded stories about how they got hooked.
The night before, a sold-out opening party drew a record 625 guests. The actor Fred Savage was among them, and so were the people behind Chopard, Urwerk and Kari Voutilainen‘s workshop. All weekend there was Chandon on the floor, award winning bourbon from Jefferson’s, and a Jean Rousseau strap bar for anyone who wanted to dress up the watch they walked in with.
Try It On, Ask the CEO
Collectors getting hands-on at the tables, watches out of the case and onto the wrist.
Away from the panels and the party, the brands were just as approachable. On the show floor, I was able to try on most of what was on the tables, and at each booth there was someone senior to talk to, whether the CEO, the marketing director, or the brand manager. The pieces north of $100,000 stayed behind glass, which is fair enough, but they were the exception.
One of the busiest tables I saw belonged to H. Moser & Cie.. The Schaffhausen brand, owned by the Meylan family since 2012, brought a new Streamliner developed with the Alpine motorsport team. Claudio Terjanian the US President was kind enough to show me some of his favorites
Its case is anthracite-gray ceramic, and the open dial looks straight down onto blue-finished bridges. At six o’clock sits a flying tourbillon, a rotating cage meant to offset the pull of gravity. Only 100 will be made.
From Eco-Drive to The Godfather
MB&F’s SP One Pavée on pale blue leather, beside Jacob & Co.’s The Godfather II with Don Corleone’s silhouette on the dial.
Moser wasn’t the only brand with something new. More than a dozen used the weekend to unveil or present recent releases, and the prices ran from a couple of thousand dollars to nearly half a million.
At one end was Citizen, marking 50 years of its light-powered Eco-Drive with the ATTESA Power of Purple Aurora. The titanium watch resets itself by GPS satellite wherever you travel, and its subdials shift between purple and blue as you tilt it. It’s $2,295, limited to 1,500 pieces.
In the middle sat the SP One Pavée from MB&F, the Geneva brand’s smallest and slimmest watch, now set with 255 diamonds across its 38mm white-gold case, crown and buckle. It’s $104,000. It was great to see more of the collection after my visit earlier this year to their workshop in Geneva.
And at the far end was Jacob & Co., making its first WatchTime New York appearance with The Godfather II. Press a button at eight o’clock and a music box inside plays one of two Nino Rota themes from the film for 15 to 20 seconds. It also has a flying tourbillon, comes in rose gold, and costs $440,000, in a run of 74.
Newcomers, Old and New
Gérald Genta’s Geneva Time Only Marrone, left, and Daniel Roth’s Extra Plat Rose Gold Gilt with its gold Roman numerals.
Jacob & Co. was one of nine brands showing here for the first time, and the newcomers were where I found watches I’d never seen before. Two of them, Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta, arrived as a pair, both historic names that LVMH brought back in 2023.
Daniel Roth showed the Extra Plat Rose Gold Gilt in its signature double-ellipse case. The dial is made the old way: the numerals are masked on a solid-gold base, the rest is plated black, and when the mask comes off the gold shows through. The Gérald Genta Geneva Time Only Marrone is simpler, a smoky brown dial in a 38mm rose-gold cushion case drawn from the designer’s own work in the 1970s.
Those two are old names given a second life. KUDOKE is still on its first, run by the watchmaker Stefan Kudoke and named after his wife, Ev. The KUDOKE 3 Raspberry, its red, white and blue a nod to America’s 250th year, has a three-armed hour hand that reads the hours across three separate scales.
That’s the best reason to go to WatchTime New York. The watch is on the table, and the person who made it is standing right behind it.
All images © 2026 Ana Martins Communications. All rights reserved.
