Why Do Artists Love Making Watches? Samuel Ross Has the Answer
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When he won the Hublot Design Prize in 2019 – an event he describes as having a “seismic” impact on his career – Samuel Ross’s first thoughts were not of imminent fame and fortune.
Instead, the British industrial designer and former Virgil Abloh protégé calculated that the award was an opportunity to “get in front of the C-Suite at Hublot and talk about their proprietary technology,” a conversation he hoped “could potentially outline the future of what luxury watches could be.”
Sitting in a second-storey room overlooking the bustling courtyard of Soho House’s Miami outpost five years later and ahead of its launch during Miami Art Week last night (December 5), Ross wonders if his third Hublot collab – the Hublot Big Bang Tourbillon Carbon SR_A by Samuel Ross – is just that: the future of luxury watches.
“Since New Labour and Britpop the avant-garde in design has been relatively quiet,” says the founder of the industrial design studio SR_A, pointing to the world-changing influence 25 years ago of maverick designers such as Marc Newson and Sir Johnny Ive.
Ross was born in 1991.
“Where are the new stories to be told for this century that my generation can contribute to?” he asks. “That’s a huge driver to make sure we’re not rehashing the past.”
With the benefit of three years’ hindsight, Ross says he’s beginning to see how his probing watch designs might yet be symbolic of a zeitgeist building back towards the sort of pioneering period for design that defined his childhood years.
“I look at each year as a pendulum swing,” he says, reminding me that his new watch follows the orange Big Bang Tourbillon Samuel Ross of 2022 and the lime green Big Bang Tourbillon SR_A by Samuel Ross of 2023.
“The first year you crash into the cathedral vault, and you get a lot of orange and TPE [thermoplastic elastomers, or rubber]. And then as it swings back, you remove all that TPE and become minimalistic. But now we’re swinging back into the cathedral.”
At 44mm and cast in a mix of frosted grey carbon, shiny micro-blasted titanium and blue rubber – the latter pairing perforated with a graphic repeating hexagonal pattern – the Big Bang Tourbillon Carbon SR_A by Samuel Ross undoubtedly has iconoclastic tendencies.
Those are made sharper still by Hublot’s complex in-house movement, which makes no attempt to hide either its spindly skeletonised tourbillon or its spinning micro-rotor, placing them front and centre at 6 and 12 o’clock respectively.
It’s a heck of a watch.
Given the perforations that give the watch its grille aesthetic are intended to channel sweat away from the skin, and that the watch is leaf-light and ergonomically just about perfect, in the most prosaic of terms, it’s also a sports watch.
And yet lumping it with a steely Carrera or flinty Oyster Perpetual, or any other watch carrying the quotidian sports watch descriptor, seems – well, inadequate.
The materiality and hi-tech profile of Ross’s watch mean it’s the sort of thing you could imagine wearing while doing low-gravity cardio on board the spaceship taking you and your fellow settlers to Mars.
The ideas that inform it, he says, had been in his head for “900 days”, a metric he uses because it helps align his projects to consumer cycles – Christmas, Chinese New Year, and so on – but the process behind the watch began in earnest 14 months ago, with what he calls a “top-down approach.”
“It’s not: ‘Hey, let’s go in and whack a new colour on it,’” he explains. “It’s like: ‘No, we need to really roadmap this and merch it from day one.’”
Merch, as in, merchandise and think about the buyer, the user, the owner and what might draw them to it. And before the design hits the paper, there are considerations of tooling, he notes. You can’t deliver what you can’t produce.
So who is the buyer of such a radical design, one with a price tag of a breezy £124,000?
Ross, who continually speaks in the elegant distortions of the design vernacular, says that with each iteration of his collaboration with Hublot, the picture becomes clearer.
“It’s the luxury sports demographic,” he says briskly. “You’re seeing this deep saturation of us knowing the market and demographic we want to speak to.”
For Hublot, the Big Bang Tourbillon Carbon SR_A by Samuel Ross is another in what now becomes a lengthy list of watches taking it deeper into the art and design worlds.
“Hublot loves art,” as its own slogan reminds us, prompting collaborations with luminaries such as Daniel Arsham, Richard Orlinski, Sang Bleu and Takashi Murakami, whose 13th and final unique Hublot watch-and-NFT package sold at auction for a staggering £210,000 just last week.
Ross, who has worked with Apple and Nike and earlier this year released a $25,000 brutalist orange toilet with the American luxury bathroom furniture company Kohler, says his approach is rather more existential.
“I see watches as similar to the relationship we have with vehicles,” he says.
“It’s this idea of engineering being the axiom of human development. A watch almost becomes a display of excellence, of what we’re capable of as a civilisation. It’s just a different scale to play with.”
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