What Are Watch Complications For Now?

On first glance Blancpain's latest rendition of its Fifty Fathoms diving watch looks much the same as its classic forebears. But then you notice the bezel, marked with half hourly increments up to three hours. The watch has a patented dedicated three hour hand too.

In short, the Fifty Fathoms Tech offers a functional complication, a world-first Blancpain introduced in 2023 and has now brought to a permanent, date-equipped model, one designed for divers who use a re-breather for long duration dives.

"It's a very simple idea really but it's nonetheless a solution to a need," said Blancpain's head of product Christian Lattmann. "Admittedly, finding those needs and answering them with a complication is not easy. But the fact is it's rare to find anyone who needs, say, a perpetual calendar either. Really those kinds of classic complications [among which might be included the moon phase, annual calendar and minute repeater] have become more about art, more about showing your ability to make them. But watchmaking still needs to try to identify actual needs and push towards those innovations."

Martin Frei, co-founder of Urwerk, said the industry needs to think hard about what purpose the mechanical watch might have in the 21st century because it otherwise "risks becoming a kind of museum, all about how watchmaking used to be done."

Even what many might think of as still useful complications, the likes of a chronograph, GMT or day/date display, are by now very old ideas, originally dating to 1913, 1953 and 1956 respectively.

As Lattmann conceded, Blancpain's latest complication is, as he called it, "niche."  Similar perhaps to the marginal utility of Jaermann & Stübi's golf-stroke counter or Krayon's Anywhere sunset/sunrise indicator model, to cite two of the very few complications that have arisen over recent decades. Smartwatches can easily offer both tools.

This wasn't always the case as mechanical watch complications once offered clear utility beyond time-telling. Prior to the quartz crisis, and long, long before smartwatches, giving mechanical watches functionality beyond simple time-telling was a means for the then many more, smaller brands, often with the flexibility and capability to build their own movements, to differentiate themselves. There was greater incentive to innovate.

Watches came able to display tide times or measure sailing runs (Yema's Yachtingraf Régate), with altimeters (Oris and Bamford gave the ProPilot Altimeter a Mission Control special edition in 2025) and thermometers, such as the one created by avant-garde French maker Lip. Still niche perhaps, relative to the broader appeal of a watch that would tell you the time left on your parking meter (Vulcain's MinStop), or one with a mechanical alarm (Jaeger-LeCoultre's Memovox, among others).

Yet the incentive faded in the face of micro-electronics. What was the point, when they're expensive to develop and may not find mainstream appeal? According to Bertrand Meylan, co-CEO of H. Moser & Cie, since then the more corporate structure of the industry, with many of its companies having layers of decision-making, has only made it more risk-averse. And, he added, perhaps it is right to be: a new complication faces an uncertain response.

Take H. Moser & Cie's own new complication, a novel pump-action winding system, on its Streamliner Pump in collaboration with Reebok. He argued that its utility might be framed more as a playful interactivity, akin perhaps to Christophe Claret's 21 Blackjack, which came complete with blackjack game. The Pump is a kind of watch meets fidget toy. The makers were careful to create a mechanism you couldn't overwind, so you can keep pushing that button.

"I've been wearing the model a lot and think it does make for a unique relationship to your watch - one of a kind I've never had before," he said. "But we always knew that some people would think the idea was cool and fun and others would see it as gimmicky. Some people would love what is a new idea and some people will hate it, though actually it hasn't been as polarising as we expected. But perhaps there just are limits to what a mechanical watch can offer in terms of being useful now."

Or, he suggested, maybe our notion of utility in a mechanical watch needs to shift, in line with accepting that even its time-telling function is increasingly moot - that, rather, the utility now is in providing ways to interact with your watch that charm or entertain.

Martin Frei goes further. Since mechanical watches clearly cannot compete with smartwatches for functionality, he argued, their new purpose, through complications, might be "more philosophical - because they can't just be about precision anymore."

"Today a complication, as something that goes beyond simply indicating the time with hands, might, for example, tell us more about time, or more about the watch itself," added Frei. "But in most of the watch world the goal to do that - to ask what a watch is for now - just isn't there."

Urwerk's own UR-10 Spacemeter is one attempt at exactly that. It has a complication that roughly demonstrates the relationship between time and distance, with dials to indicate the Earth's rotation and the distance the Earth has travelled in its orbit around the sun. The idea isn't to provide essential information, so much as to "give you another notion of space and how we fit into it, to show you just what a crazy distance we've all travelled just sitting here."