Design is key in TAG Heuer’s end-of-year watch releases

It's been a busy close to 2025 for TAG Heuer, which debuted new watches at Dubai Watch Week before travelling on to Art Basel Miami , where the brand's third collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara’s studio Fragment was launched.

Dubai was all about materials and innovation flavoured with a healthy dose of Formula 1 style, with the brand’s LAB concept being used to show high-tech editions of the Monaco watch. It included a Monaco chronograph with multi-coloured Super-LumiNova treatments and an iridescent metallised layer on the sapphire crystal.

Miami, by contrast, is all about the disruptive energy brought by Fragment design. Fujiwara’s practice is to enhance and push the design accents rather than designing from scratch, pulling out and amping up the elements that he feels are most distinctive and dialling back others. It’s a process that’s based on knowledge and research (for the first edition, Fujiwara based his design on a rarely seen tachymeter version of the Carrera from the 1960s). It is an approach that has won him the trust of brands, from Nike and Converse to Louis Vuitton.

This third collaboration is less of a trawl through the archive, and is based on the ‘box-glass’ Carrera that is TAG Heuer’s 21st-century take on the design, first seen in 2023. The approach, however, is the same. 'When I look at the TAG Heuer Carrera, I see shapes and stories ready to be designed and expressed,' says Fujiwara. 'My role with this new release was to listen to its structure and make decisions that protect its balance. Every detail has to earn its place. Nothing is added unless it has a reason to exist.'

In practice, that means the curved white outer flange contrasts starkly with a black-on-black dial, and the customary baton hour markers are replaced with barely there luminous dots. With the Fragment logo popping on the date wheel’s 1 and 11 positions, an elegant minimalism reigns.