The erotic watches nodding to a niche and ancient tradition

The new limited-edition Turbine from Perrelet may, on first glance, appear to be modern sports watch - think black titanium case, bold Arabic numerals, red seconds hand, and so on. But partially covering the dial are also 12 anodised aluminium blades with tungsten counterweights, such that the slightest hand movement sets them spinning - like a jet turbine. Indeed, they can move so fast as to become, in effect, invisible - and to reveal one of a series of pornographic images in style of Japanese Hentai, where Manga meets sex.

'We decided to take a look at erotic watches again but from a different position, so to speak,” says Hugo Lesizza, Perrelet’s international sales and marketing director, quipping inadvertently. 'Erotic watches have long been traditional [in style] and we wanted to create something more contemporary, to match the design of the watch, but also more fun and disruptive. With the turbine blades still it’s as though the image has been censored. But it becomes a real talking point when the image below them is revealed'.

Indeed, while Perrelet has used its Turbine design to offer a peekaboo display of imagery on its dials before - focused around abstract patterns and art works - it seems born to be used with more titillating imagery. 'Hentai is easy to play with, because it’s so graphic [not necessarily in the sexual sense] and is part of a recognisable comic-book culture,' says Lesizza. Certainly, it’s part of a much older culture too – because whiles Perrelet has been dabbling in erotic watches for some 15 years, erotic watches – as the watch industry somewhat coyly prefers to call them – have been a niche interest since the 17th century.

Historically pocket watches – and later wristwatches – would be commissioned and worn by the waggish and well-to-do to entertain – and, given that they could be highly satirical, perhaps also to shock - polite company. It was a conversation starter in a society for which all erotica was consumed very much behind closed doors. Open sales of erotic watches tended to increase in line with the libertinism of the times - under the French monarch Louis XV, for example – and likewise they somewhat faded from view with the advent of the Victorian era.

Certainly only a few brands still dip a toe - or any other protrusion - into the world of the erotic. Blancpain and Chopard have historically taken a more subdued approach but containing their watches’ erotic content to a scene on the case-back. Richard Mille’s aptly-named RM69 of 2019 toyed with the idea, through text rather than imagery. But others makers have been more bullish.

Last year Ulysse Nardin - which started producing erotic watches in the 1980s, as one way out of the quartz crisis – released a series of watches, each limited to 40 pieces, with hand-painted dials by the Italian comic book artist Milo Minara – among whose most famous works is Il Gioco, about a device that renders women helplessly aroused, and whose collaborators have included Federico Fellini, Neil Gaiman and Marvel. It has previously made highly-complex automaton erotic pieces in which the subjects depicted in flagrante on the rose gold sculpted dial move to and fro with each hour strike of the minute repeater action.

Similarly, the independent watchmaker Svend Andersen has produced watches with flip-top cases revealing automaton erotica underneath, one involving a cartoony Bill Clinton “not having sexual relations with that woman” Monica Lewinsky. Earlier this year one of Andersen’s erotic pieces - involving depicting the underwater meeting of a scuba diver and a mermaid - sold at auction for almost £29,000, twice the estimate. Jacob & Co has also made automaton pieces, with a dial cover and dedicated crown to reveal the sex scene below.

But despite these watchmakers making various efforts to give their watches’ erotic potential, Lesizza concedes that such pieces are made in limited editions in part because there are some barriers to selling them. 'For many brands the idea of the erotic watch is too risqué - it just doesn’t fit with their public image as they see it,' he says. 'And some retailers are reluctant to stock these kinds of erotic pieces too. When we demonstrate how collectors are after them they can sometimes be persuaded - though we don’t even try to make that argument in [religious] countries.'

Are erotic watches a dying breed then? Has the ubiquity of pornography taken the edge off the erotic watch’s appeal? Maybe, through Lesizza argues something else. Erotic content may be one way for watches to stand-put in an increasingly crowded market, but 'my feeling is that very few brands will continue to make erotic watches because I think society is actually becoming more conservative again.'