Fashion

Vacheron Constantin Is Turning 270 Years of Watchmaking Into an Art Exhibition

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 24, 2026

You could put a few very expensive watches behind glass and call it an exhibition. Vacheron Constantin has been around far too long for that. The Swiss watchmaker is bringing “Explore All Ways Possible” to Dubai this September, an immersive exhibition that approaches watchmaking through geography, art, architecture, and cultural exchange. After its UAE debut, the roadshow will travel to Saudi Arabia in December. At its center is a selection of contemporary and historical Vacheron Constantin timepieces, but the more interesting story lies in everything surrounding them, particularly a new world created specifically for the Middle East by Emirati artist Mariam Abbas.

For a house founded in Geneva in 1755, travel has historically meant considerably more than collecting passport stamps. Vacheron Constantin is the world’s oldest watch manufacture to have remained in continuous operation since its founding, and its expansion beyond Switzerland became part of its creative history. By the early 19th century, François Constantin was undertaking trade voyages that helped carry the manufacture abroad, while encounters with different places, crafts, and aesthetics would eventually make their way back onto wrists. The house still organizes much of its identity around a line Constantin wrote to his partner Jacques-Barthélémi Vacheron in 1819: “Do better if possible, and that is always possible.”

“Explore All Ways Possible” divides that story according to the four cardinal directions. North is associated with navigation and the Overseas collection; South looks toward civilizations and historical craftsmanship; East considers decorative traditions encountered across cultures; and West takes on modernity, including the wonderfully strange Historiques American 1921, whose diagonal dial still looks slightly rebellious more than a century after its original design appeared.

Then there is a fifth direction, one that does not exist on a compass. For the Dubai and Saudi editions, Emirati illustrator and visual designer Abbas has created an additional universe that places the Middle East inside the exhibition’s imagined geography instead of treating the region as another stop on a traveling show. Abbas, whose practice frequently examines architecture, botany, and the environments around us, builds an almost surreal Arabian landscape filled with details that reward a closer look.

Seen on page five of the exhibition presentation, her world opens through a mosque arch onto golden dunes and native flora. Calotropis procera flowers appear beneath date palm fronds; teela marbles float overhead like planets; fish swim through the sky; a paper plane crosses the horizon; and a hoopoe surveys the scene. Wind towers share the skyline with contemporary skyscrapers. Tasmeem Tashkeel has translated Abbas’s illustration into the physical installation, turning the artwork into a space visitors can actually enter.

Mechanical watchmaking has always occupied a strange territory between engineering and art. A watch technically exists to tell you the time, a job your phone can accomplish before you have even finished raising your wrist. Haute horlogerie survives because usefulness stopped being the whole point a very long time ago. Guilloché, engraving, enameling, gem-setting, miniature painting, and movement finishing turn an object designed to measure minutes into a canvas measured in millimeters.

Vacheron Constantin has pushed especially far into that territory. Its Métiers d’Art watches have incorporated techniques including Japanese maki-e lacquer, while other creations have looked toward sculpture, antiquity and works held by the Louvre. Even the house’s earliest known pocket watch, made by Jean-Marc Vacheron in 1755, paired its mechanics with delicately worked gold hands and ornamental arabesques on the balance cock. The technical object and the decorative object were already sharing the same tiny space.

That conversation continues with the watches arriving in Dubai. Among them is the platinum Overseas Self-Winding Ultra-Thin, powered by a movement only 2.4mm thick and limited to 255 pieces; the pink mother-of-pearl Égérie Moon Phase “Spring Blossom”; a one-of-one Les Cabinotiers Minute Repeater Tourbillon Skeleton; the Historiques American 1921; and four titanium Overseas Dual Time “Cardinal Points” references developed with photographer and explorer Cory Richards.

The exhibition also digs into the mechanical experiments that got Vacheron Constantin here, including its unusual Jalousie watches of the 1930s, shuttered pocket watches designed for travel, experiments in miniaturization, and the development of world-time functions. There is also the Chronomètre Royal, introduced in 1907 as a precision watch sturdy enough to take chronometry out of competitions and into everyday life.

All of which makes “Explore All Ways Possible” an exhibition about watches that does not require you to spend the entire time staring at watches. After 270 years of continuous production, Vacheron Constantin has accumulated enough history to show that watchmaking has never existed in isolation. Art changes it. Travel changes it. Architecture, fashion, technological advances, and encounters with other forms of craftsmanship change it too.

Vacheron Constantin Is Turning 270 Years of Watchmaking Into an Art Exhibition

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