Timeless by design: Movado marks 145 years of Swiss watchmaking
In 1881, a nineteen-year-old named Achille Ditesheim hired six watchmakers and opened a small workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. One hundred and forty-five years later, the house he built “Movado” stands as one of the most enduring names in Swiss watchmaking. To mark this milestone, Movado is launching a sweeping multimedia campaign that offers a look into its archives, its design studios, and its manufacturing floors to the world, tracing the arc from that first workshop to the watches being crafted today.
Guided by head designer Eric Bonnet, the campaign is as much a design story as its history, showing each piece at every stage, tracing each watch from concept to finished piece as it earns its Swiss Made label. The result is a rare behind the scenes portrait of a house that has never stopped evolving or asking what a watch can be.
The campaign does not just look back; it looks at what endures. Across the collection, four collections stand out as the clearest expression of what Movado has always done best, design that earns its place, across eras, and across time.
No piece better represents Movado's design philosophy than the Museum Watch. The Museum Watch is perhaps the most recognised piece in Movado’s catalogue, and a natural centerpiece of the anniversary campaign. Designed in 1947 by Bauhaus-influenced artist Nathan George Horwitt, it falls almost exactly at the midpoint of Movado’s 145-year story, a hinge between the house’s heritage designs and its contemporary work. Horwitt’s inspiration was the world’s oldest timekeeper: the sundial. A single dot at twelve o’clock, representing the sun at high noon. The result was at once a timepiece, an icon of modern design, and a work of art, the first watch ever inducted into MoMA’s permanent collection in 1960. The museum dial is a part of 20+ museum's permanent collection and reinterpreted across colorways, materials, and complications, but always anchored to that single, iconic dot.
A century-old blueprint, reimaginedReleased last year, the Heritage 1917 is a reimagining of one of Movado’s first square watches from the Art Deco era. This period was formative for Movado design innovation: between 1910 and 1921, the house produced over 700 distinct watch case shapes, spanning octagonal, oval, round, square, rectangular, and more experimental geometric forms. The Heritage 1917 reinterprets a distinctive square design from that era, retaining the period’s stylish Arabic numerals and geometric detailing while introducing contemporary elements including a sunray dial and steel band options.
The Museum Imperiale unites two pillars of Movado’s design history: the clarity and elegance of the Museum Watch and the house’s tradition of modern sport design, first introduced in the 1980s with the original Imperiale. In the decades since, the collection has continuously evolved. A true sporty-dress hybrid, the Museum Imperiale brings a sleek elegance and a steely, performance-minded character. Its most distinctive design element is the dotted bezel, a detail carried across the decades, which extends the iconic Museum dot motif outward from the dial to four points along the bezel, connecting the watch’s art historical lineage to its physical architecture. A curved bezel flows into a sculptural three-row bracelet, forming a clean, uninterrupted silhouette from case to wrist.
In the flourishing postwar 1950s, as a new era of transatlantic travel and modern living took shape, the dress watch had a renaissance of its own. Watch houses competed to fit complex automatic movements inside slim, refined cases, and in 1956, Movado unveiled the Kingmatic, an icon of midcentury design that remained in production for nearly three decades. The Heritage Kingmatic reintroduces that legacy, reviving the distinctive cushion-shaped case first released by the house in 1962. A curved sunray dial and convex applied markers honor the vintage character of the original, while the overall composition remains true to the refined sensibility that defined the collection at its peak.
Movado watches are available in the UAE at EDIT by Ahmed Seddiqi boutiques and online at byedit.com. To explore the full 145th anniversary collection, visit any EDIT by Ahmed Seddiqi location across the UAE.