What Can the GPHG 2026 Nominees Tell Us About Modern Watchmaking?

This year’s GPHG awards ceremony is only a day away, and the final votes have already been cast in secret. Whatever the jury has decided behind closed doors in Geneva remains sealed until Saturday night, leaving everyone else guessing who's taking home the Aiguille d'Or. 

With the decisions already made, it's a good moment to read the list in a different way. This year, 194 brands submitted 320 watches and clocks, and the roughly thousand-strong GPHG Academy narrowed them down to 84 nominees in 14 categories. That makes the shortlist a fairly honest snapshot of what the watchmaking industry put forward over the past year, and once you set the predictions aside, a few patterns start to appear. 

GPHG 2026 Drops Gendered Watch Categories

The first big change is in the categories. The Men's and Ladies' categories have been replaced by Essential, Complication, and Gemset. Now, watches are grouped by what they do instead of who we’re told that they’re supposedly meant for. Most collectors moved past those old labels years ago. 

That's how the MB&F SP One, with its barrel and balance seemingly floating beneath sapphire domes, ends up in Essential alongside Stéphane Pierre's L'Impétrant, which tells the time with a pair of retrograde hands. Under last year's rules, both would probably have landed in Men's by default, which wouldn't have told you much about either. 

Grouping watches by function also makes it easier to see what brands want to highlight. This year, many of them want you to focus on the movement. 

Open-Worked Dials Are Becoming More Common

Five nominees this year have skeleton or squelette in their names, compared to just two openworked watches last year. This matches what you notice when looking through the list. Some are familiar faces with the dial taken away, like the Daniel Roth Extra Plat Rose Gold Skeleton, which arrives a year after the standard Extra Plat won the Time Only category. Favre Leuba says the Chief Skeleton is the first fully skeletonized watch in its 289-year history. That's a long time to wait to open things up. 

Other brands take a similar approach without calling it skeletonization. H. Moser & Cie. placed the hammers and gongs of its minute repeater on the dial side of the Endeavor Cosmic Rain, and Bernhard Lederer flipped the CIC 39 InVerto so that the double remontoir d'égalité, usually hidden behind the dial, is now front and center. 

David Candaux's DC6 Night Forest features a flying tourbillon tilted at 30 degrees, but his GPHG entry openly discusses how a tourbillon actually does very little on a moving wrist. His honesty suggests that much of the openworked movement is about what collectors enjoy seeing, not just performance. 

This may be indicative of a bigger shift. "I think this reflects a broader desire for transparency in craftsmanship," said Pietro Tomajer, co-founder of The Limited Edition and a member of the GPHG jury in 2023. "At a time when the industrialization of craftsmanship seems to have reached its limits, with big brands increasingly struggling, independent watchmakers have become the symbol of genuine artisanal excellence, and skeletonization is perhaps one of the clearest expressions of this trend." 

That shift has changed where collectors look, too. “For many collectors today, the movement is no longer just the engine of the watch. It is a large part of the artistic and technical value proposition," Tomajer said. "Independent watchmaking, in particular, has spent the last two decades elevating finishing, architecture, and movement design to the same level as the dial and case. Whether through skeletonization or by bringing mechanical elements onto the dial side, brands are increasingly allowing collectors to engage directly with the complexity and craftsmanship that justify these watches." 

From Jumping Hours to a Grande Double Sonnerie: Complications That Rethink the Basics

The complications have a similar sense of showmanship. Blancpain is back at the GPHG for the first time in 12 years with a Grande Double Sonnerie, but a lot of the creativity elsewhere has gone into how the time is displayed. Jumping hours appear on the Audemars Piguet Neo Frame and the SpaceOne x Baltic Seconde Majeure, and Otsuka Lotec lays out the No.8 like a mixing console, with the minutes sliding back like a fader. 

A few go deeper still. Dominique Renaud's Pulse60 has a balance that oscillates just 60 times a minute, roughly the pace of a resting heart, and Mathieu Cleguer spent five years making a version of the 200-year-old natural escapement for his debut watch, the Inspiration One. His timepiece resolves the historic system's well-known inability to self-start. Work like this rarely photographs well, so it's encouraging to see the Academy members notice and appreciate it. 

Independent Brands and Collaborations Challenge Watchmaking’s Big Names

Much of this innovation comes from small workshops, which may be the biggest trend this year. Fifty-six brands fill the 84 nominee spots, and 41 of them are represented just once. The Cleguer and the Stéphane Pierre are the first watches their makers have ever produced, and the list includes makers from Japan, Russia, China, the Middle East, and the US. There’s lots of space for smaller brands, especially since Patek Philippe, Cartier, and Vacheron Constantin aren’t nominated, and Breguet is taking a break after last year’s win. 

Tomajer sees that as real progress. "The growing presence of independents at the GPHG is certainly a sign of recognition, as independent watchmakers today enjoy far greater visibility and credibility than they did ten or fifteen years ago," he said. "We are witnessing a significant cultural shift."

He puts it in artistic terms. "Watchmaking is a form of art, and, as in any artistic discipline, new and inspiring talent emerges every year. What the GPHG demonstrates is that independent watchmaking is no longer a niche on the margins of the industry,” Tomajer said. “This fully landed on me when I was invited in 2023 as a member of the jury." 

It's easy to see why Tomajer would feel that way. He would have been sitting alongside Vianney Halter, Naoya Hida and Dominique Renaud that year, all three of whom have watches on this year's list. "Some of the most innovative work in terms of movement construction, finishing, and artistic expression is coming from small ateliers," he said. 

Some of that work is shared, too. Six nominees carry two brands' names, and the partnerships run deeper than simple co-branding. The UR-FREAK combines Ulysse Nardin's crownless FREAK with Urwerk's wandering hour satellites, and Behrens and Vianney Halter co-developed an 870-component caliber for the KWH. 

What the GPHG 2026 Nominees Say About the Future of Watchmaking

Taken together, the list points to an industry that's more willing to show you how its watches work and much more open to small makers from well outside the Vallée de Joux. Tomajer isn't convinced those makers should chase the spotlight too hard, though. "The challenge now is to broaden awareness among collectors and the wider public," he said. "At the same time, the inherently limited production capacities of many independent watchmakers suggest that mass recognition is not necessarily something that should be actively pursued. In many cases, exclusivity and authenticity remain fundamental parts of their appeal. They are and should remain hidden gems, so to speak." 

No matter what the sealed results reveal, the full shortlist is worth saving. In a few years, it will be an interesting record of where watchmaking was headed, and a great list of hidden gems while they were still under the radar.