A New Watch for 2027: The 12th Art Makes Its Case for Watchmaking as an Art

The 12th Art is an international initiative created to defend, promote and elevate the professions of watchmaking, jewellery, fine jewellery and goldsmithing and to have them recognised together as the twelfth art, a form of expression in its own right alongside painting, music and film. Conceived by the watch-enthusiastic Antoine Gamboni and carried with Robert Schmitz, Alain Knecht, Raymond Lacoste and Benjamin Osete, it unites the four crafts under one banner and now takes its first physical form in a watch planned for 2027, built in Switzerland and presented here ahead of any public reveal.

A watch measures time. A fine watch keeps it. The list of the arts, meanwhile, has been growing for a century. Cinema joined it as the seventh in 1911, the comic as the ninth in 1964, the video game soon after. Each time, someone made the case that a discipline had outgrown its trade and become a form of expression in its own right. Watchmaking, with five centuries of mechanical invention and a tradition of authorship as old as any painter’s, has never had a seat. Antoine Gamboni decided to change that.

The twelfth art is the name he gave the claim, and it rests on an argument older than him. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his lectures on aesthetics delivered in the 1820s, ranked the arts by a single test: how far each frees itself from raw matter and lets the spirit show. A master watchmaker is known by his work the way a painter or a sculptor is, Gamboni wrote in his manifesto, and has earned the same standing. The case extends to the jeweller, the goldsmith, the silversmith, the four crafts he wants seen as one and placed twelfth on the list. Gamboni gave the idea its name, gathered brands, makers and federations behind it under the banner of the 12th Art, and let the initiative wait until the argument was ready to be made in public.

That moment is now. In 2025, Gamboni joined forces with Schmitz, Knecht, Lacoste and Osete to turn the idea into reality, more than a decade after the first deposit of the 12th Art Manifesto with the French intellectual property authorities in 2011. They were the professional partners he had been waiting for.

Together, they founded InnovART in 2025, a legal structure based in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, created to hold and coordinate the 12th Art initiative, its intellectual property, partnerships and future commercial developments. In 2027, the idea is set to take its first physical form: a unique, never-before-seen handmade watch that a collector can wear.

That same year, the word mark “12th Art” was officially filed in both French (“12e Art”) and English (12th Art) with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, EUIPO, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, IPI, covering classes 14, 35 and 41. It has since been officially registered by InnovART, following Antoine Gamboni’s initial 2011 filing of the 12th Art Manifesto with the French intellectual property authorities.

The distinction at the heart of the twelfth art

Schmitz is the one who explains what the twelfth art is for, and he keeps returning to a single word. Recognition. A maker can call himself a maker, and the title travels only as far as his own word for it. The twelfth art exists to settle the matter for everyone else. “Anyone can say he is a craftsman,” Schmitz says in conversation with The Silent Luxury. “The twelfth art is what tells the world that a real body of knowledge and a real hand stand behind the work. This is a distinction.” The word matters to him. It places a person within a larger cultural order and grants the discipline a standing it could otherwise only claim for itself.

The decision to build the initiative and to carry it for more than a decade before showing a single object was deliberate. “That is really a kind of investment,” Schmitz says, and he means more than money. “We have mastered the way we want to achieve it, because we believe it.”

The equality he wants runs between disciplines. A watchmaker, he means, wrestles with the same questions a sculptor does. What material becomes once a hand shapes it. When technique turns into signature. When an object starts to carry more than its function. It is Hegel’s test, applied to a balance wheel instead of a block of marble.

Why luxury needs the twelfth art now

For years the industry has leaned on four words, heritage, craft, authenticity and rarity, and leaned so hard the words have gone hollow. They turn up in every campaign, on every website, on every fair stand, and repetition has drained them. When everyone claims origin, origin has to be proven. When everyone claims rarity, someone has to say whether it was manufactured or real.

The twelfth art answers by moving the claim from talk to placement. It asks for a recognisable hand, real command of material, a language of one’s own, the kind of endurance that survives a season. For The Silent Luxury the overlap is exact. A watch is worth what the bond behind it is worth, between a maker and his material, between the work and the collector who keeps it. The classification names that worth before the market does.

A first look at the 2027 watch

For the first time, the makers describe what the watch sets out to do. The 12th Art is bringing a new watch to market, built in Switzerland, and at its centre sits the innovation the initiative is built around. The watch proposes an entirely new way of displaying time. “The main message will come from the innovation,” Schmitz says. “It will be a new way to read the time.” Raymond Lacoste, among them, describes a change in how a person works with the watch rather than how it looks, a new act of reading that goes past simply checking the hour. They keep the mechanism itself for a later moment, and Schmitz puts a phrase to that patience. “We have to hold on to silent wisdom,” he says. The idea is on the table today. The movement comes later. The team will establish a new company in Switzerland which will oversee the development, production and technical execution of the watch, under the leadership of Raymond Lacoste.

The schedule is the one thing offered without hedging. Five personalised prototypes are due in 2027, Schmitz says. A limited first series follows. These very first watches will be on pre-sale through their website for passionate connoisseurs and collectors. The sold watches by retailers, being it large groups or small entities, will however be presented as a “Collection of the 12th Art“.

A limited series of watches: a souscription for the twelfth art

A limited amount of watches amount to a statement of intent, well short of a collection in any industrial sense. The number sits close to a souscription, and the word carries its own history. Abraham-Louis Breguet built the model in 1797, asking buyers for a quarter of the price as a deposit before a single part was made, delivering each watch in the order it was subscribed. The arrangement secured the capital and bound the collector to the work before it existed. Two centuries later the same logic still moves independent watchmaking, from Breguet through to F.P. Journe, where the buyer commits to a hand and an idea ahead of the finished object. Backing a watch they have not seen is the modern version of it.

That logic only makes sense against the real shape of independent watchmaking, which is bigger than most people assume. Count the small brands, the direct-to-collector labels, the young ateliers and the lone makers, and the field runs to several hundred names. The first comprehensive sector report on independent watchmaking drew in 2025 on data from eighty-one brands. The narrow circle is far smaller, the place where genuine horological authorship, tiny production and collector relevance actually meet. The Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants, the leading body of its kind, counts roughly three dozen members from about a dozen countries.

The gap between those two figures is the point. Independent can describe a brand that sits outside a conglomerate. It can also describe a single designer or atelier with a language entirely its own, and for the collector the second meaning is the one that counts. That is the meaning the twelfth art wants to make visible. The 2027 watch becomes the first real test of whether an idea born in a manifesto can read clearly in an object you can hold. How far this shift in the collector market reaches today is set out in the inversion of value and in the example of an early souscription.

Why the 12th Art looks to the Asian market

The project includes the East from the start, and Alain Knecht says so plainly. The future lies in the Asian markets, while Europe, in his reading, has settled into a slower rhythm. The energy gathers where a younger collecting culture is still forming its taste, and for Knecht that alone is reason enough to include those markets from the first day.

Knecht is more specific. He expects the first watches to find their buyers in China, where he keeps contacts and has meetings set through the autumn. The counterfeit trade that follows European luxury around, he points out, says nothing about the appetite inside China itself, where collectors want the real work and a striking share of them are women. Hong Kong he describes almost as a density, a few streets and a handful of shops where collectors stand close enough together that a watch can be shown and understood in a single afternoon.

The map has shifted further than the European trade likes to admit. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and India are buying markets and collecting cultures at once, with a younger generation of collectors who set their own standards for what a watch is worth. The same movement runs through the Indian watch market. An idea that wants international standing has to read clearly there first.

The economics behind the twelfth art

The most grounding moment in the conversation belongs to Lacoste, who has spent his career inside the large groups and knows precisely which number ends a meeting. The 12th Art aims at the very top of the market, he says, in perception and in quality at once, and the figures still have to add up. “The famous houses, they come to me, and they all look at the same metric,” he says. “At the very high level they are still looking at the economy. That is the name of the game.” A cultural idea is welcome in those rooms, and association with the 12th Art holds genuine appeal, yet a house signs only once the numbers work.

That is the honest part of the pitch. The 12th Art is betting that the cultural rank it confers also makes commercial sense, that being named among the arts helps a house sell without giving up what it sells.

What the 12th Art begins in 2027

The next markers are concrete. Prototypes in 2027, then a first very limited series of watches. Beyond that, Schmitz says, the twelfth art is in the end an art collection, a body of work that will arrive in stages. The silent wisdom he named earlier governs the pace: say only what is ready to be said. For now there is one watch, and an early look at the idea behind it.