LVMH Watch Week: Why Tiffany & Co.’s New Timer Has Piqued Our Interest

There is a particular kind of legitimacy that cannot be manufactured overnight in watchmaking. It accrues slowly, through intent and continuity. And the new Timer from Tiffany & Co., unveiled at LVMH Watch Week 2026 in Milan, is an object that understands this truth intimately.

For Tiffany & Co., the act of revisiting the Timer is not an exercise in nostalgia but a reminder that timekeeping has long been part of the House’s intellectual and commercial DNA.

Long before wristwatches became a stage for branding theatrics, Tiffany was already supplying precision instruments to scientists, sportsmen, and industrialists. So, when Charles Lewis Tiffany began retailing watches in 1847, he did so with a clear-eyed respect for precision.
 

By 1866, the House had created what is now recognized as its first stopwatch, a utilitarian yet refined pocket instrument that spoke to the era’s obsession with measurement, progress, and control. Two years later, it was christened the “Tiffany Timer,” and by the 1870s, Tiffany had established a full watchmaking manufacture in Geneva.
 

This historical grounding matters because the modern luxury watch landscape is crowded with well-funded but thinly rooted propositions. Against this backdrop, the new Tiffany Timer feels unusually anchored. It is not “Tiffany entering watches,” but Tiffany continuing a conversation that never truly stopped – albeit one that has often been conducted discreetly.

The use of the El Primero 400 movement is perhaps the most consequential choice of all. If legitimacy in watchmaking is currency, the El Primero is blue-chip stock. Launched in 1969 as the world’s first integrated automatic chronograph, it remains one of the most respected calibers ever produced – high-frequency, robust, and intellectually pure.
 

Tiffany’s customization of the movement is restrained and intelligent. The architecture remains intact, preserving the El Primero’s symmetrical three-register layout and intuitive legibility, with chronograph seconds tracing the periphery, minutes and hours at 3 and 6 o’clock, running seconds at 9 o’clock, and a date window at 6 o’clock.
 

Where Tiffany allows itself a moment of poetry is on the winding rotor visible through the exhibition caseback. And it comes in the form of an 18K yellow gold “Bird on a Rock” – Jean Schlumberger’s joyful, defiant icon – perched atop the openworked oscillating weight.
 

At just 1.4cm wide, it is a miniature sculpture, hand-polished in the old manner using diamond abrasives and gentian wood. Integrating it required recalibrating the rotor’s mass. This matters as it is engineered into the movement’s equilibrium.

The decision to house the watch in a 40mm platinum case is telling. Platinum, that most unshowy of precious metals, signals confidence without ostentation. Its cool density gives the Timer physical gravitas, while the case itself – polished, fluid, and gently architectural – manages to feel rather contemporary, even if it is quite thick.
 

The chronograph pushers, curved and integrated into the case flank, are particularly elegant, doubling as crown protectors and lending the watch a sculptural coherence that many chronographs lack. This is a case designed to be worn and proportioned for real wrists.

Then there is the dial, rendered in that instantly recognizable yet perilously difficult-to-achieve Tiffany Blue. Color, especially one so instantly recognizable, can be a trap. However, this piece’s dial construction – which required over fifty hours of labor involving successive layers of matte varnish, transparent lacquer, kiln drying, and hand finishing – transforms what could have been a branding shortcut into a legitimate métiers d’art exercise.
 

Moreover, the baguette-cut diamond hour markers are not decorative afterthoughts but structural elements, aligned with Tiffany’s historic authority in stone-setting. They add light without feminizing the overall look.