Gerald Genta: A Luxury Watch Designer Profile

It's not often you read profiles of luxury watch designers. Luxury watch makers, yes. But for a watch designer to be profiled, they need to be something special.
One such designer stands out. He is associated with some of the most legendary watches of the 20th century. His personality and his genius have shaped the way modern watch cases are built. If you own a Patek Philippe, an Audemars Piguet, a Breguet, you're wearing his stylistic influence every time you strap it on.
His name is Gerald Genta , and to profile him is to profile the design language not just of one or two timepieces, but of the luxury watch industry itself. Some of his creations are so influential that they define everything that came after them. Take the Royal Oak, for example. If you're a luxury sports watch, you either are a Royal Oak, or you look like a Royal Oak, or you deliberately don't look like a Royal Oak. In other words: whatever you choose to do with a luxury sports watch, the ultimate look is dictated by the appearance of a single timepiece, designed over 30 years ago.
Aside from the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak , Genta designed the Patek Philippe Nautilus, the IWC Ingenieur , the Bvlgari Bvlgari. None of these luxury watches have changed since the day they left Genta's drawing-board—or, in the case of the Nautilus, which was designed in a restaurant at the Basel trade fair, his napkin. And that speaks volumes about the single-mindedness and clarity of his work. You can't top perfection, so no-one has ever tried. Yes, there's a tweak here or a slight update there. But basically, these pieces are the same as they were the day Genta created them.
These pieces were all debuted in a prolific period, between 1972 and 1976. But they are far from the only luxury watches to have come from the mind of Gerald Genta. This far-sighted genius either solely designed, or had a hand in, around 100,000 models. And their dials bear the names of the most famous horological brands in the world.
For Omega, Genta worked on the Seamaster and the Constellation. He created every classic Audemars Piguet between 1953 and the launch of the Royal Oak. Around the same time period, all Breguet pieces were Genta's. He made pieces for Vacheron Constantin , Chopard, and Hamilton. And he still found time to create his own line of luxury watches, complete with high-complication movements—one of which, the Fantasy (which features Disney characters on its dial), has attained cult status.
Gerald Genta (or Charles Gerald Genta, to give him his full name) was born in Switzerland in 1931. In 1946, he became an apprentice in the jewellery business, and was granted a Swiss federal diploma in jewellery and goldsmithing. Shortly after graduating, Genta found employment with Universal, a Swiss manufacturer famous for its acclaimed chronographs. Genta's designs for Universal included the Polerouter, a watch that found a fame equal to Omega's Seamaster and the Rolex Oyster.
It was after he made his mark at Universal that the young Genta was given the opportunity to work on the watches that created his legacy.
Genta was a designer of great fluidity, who took inspiration from the world around him. The Royal Oak, for instance, was famously designed to represent the helmet of a scaphander—the deep-sea dive suit worn by undersea welders. The bezel with its revealed screws echoes the front flap of the helmet. That one stroke of genius—'making visible what had hitherto always been meant to remain hidden', to quote Genta himself, speaking in an interview with veryimportantwatches.com—is responsible for the face of Hublot's Big Bang , the revealed spline screws on a Richard Mille. It's passed so deeply into the language of luxury sports watches that we expect to see revealed screws on any piece that doesn't have a rotating bezel.
Genta credited Raymond Loewy, a French-born American designer, as his number one influence. Loewy's designs are instantly familiar: the sleek silver lines of a classic Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike cigarette package, the Shell logo. In a career spanning 70 years, Loewy gave American industries the big, bold, streamlined shapes that made such an impact on the rest of the world. Genta's watches, themselves masterworks of streamlining and pop-culture influence, are fine successors to the Loewy mantle.
Perhaps the other reason Gerald Genta's name stands out in the pantheon of horological design is his ability to flip between the outside and the inside of the watch. This was a man who was no stranger to complications. His made complicated pieces, which he would design and build under the Gerald Genta (and later, Gerald Charles) name. Genta designed the movements, the dials, the cases of his complex luxury watches, and often completed all work himself. Some of his most ambitious pieces—like the Gerald Genta Grande Sonnerie Retro, which was at the time the world's most complicated wristwatch—took more than five years to finish. Prices ranged from the hundreds of thousands to the millions, and clients included rock stars, royalty, and politicians.
If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because Gerald Genta's career reads like a modern version of the Abraham-Louis Breguet story. Like Genta, Breguet became a horological celebrity, commanding a client list that spanned political divides and royal houses. Like Genta, Breguet created one of the most famous and complex timepieces ever made. And, like Genta, Breguet's influence lives on in the shape and style of a whole family of luxury watches. Where Genta is the father of the modern sports watch, Breguet is the grandfather of the refined tradition of haute horology.
Even here, though, the legacies of Breguet and Gerald Genta intertwine. Genta's own watches, after all, included sonneries—a respected and difficult complication in Breguet's day, as now. And they also incorporated complications never before seen, like the 'Heure Glissante' (Slipping Time) function, and the now-ubiquitous retrograde function (in which the watch hands snap back to zero after marking out 12 hours, or 60 minutes). Genta, unannounced and unassumingly, was quietly forging out a much broader legacy, one that is tied to the very foundations of high-end watchmaking.
Genta himself was a fan of painting, and not a great fan of watches. He liked designing timepieces more than he liked wearing them, though he did once wear the first ever Nautilus to a meeting with Patek Philippe . And I do mean the first one. As in, the original completed Nautilus to come out of Patek's workshop in the 1970s, with no serial number. Value: incalculable. Anish Kapoor (the sculptor and installation artist), Cezanne, Dali, Picasso—all of these greats inspired Genta's work over the years. He saw watches as an expression in which the materials of the case, the dial, were elements of the painter's palette. And his masterpieces, like Breguet's, truly were works of horological art.
Gerald Genta died in 2011. He was 80 years old. Perhaps it is fitting to leave the final words to him, a man who knew more about luxury watches and design than most of us could understand in a lifetime of study.
In his interview with veryimportantwatches.com, Genta was asked about being copied. 'Being copied,' he replied, 'does not cause me sadness… If you are not copied, you are incompetent.' The Royal Oak, and everything that came after it, is testament to just how competent Gerald Genta was.
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