10-06-2025
Leather and Silk: Materials for Unconventional Dials
Among the precious metals, enamels and ornamental stones often used to create watch dials, traditional textiles such as leather and silk have been gaining ground as unconventional accents.
Early this year, Hermès introduced a new, limited-edition model with a leather dial, following Hublot's foray into the trend last year. In 2024, the Belgian brand Ressence also introduced a watch face of hand-dyed indigo silk. And Harry Winston has a whole timepiece collection devoted to embossed silk dials in its métier d'art range.
'It's such a beautiful and unique craft,' said Benjamin Chee of the Singapore-based watchmaker Celadon, which has produced watches with dials of hand-embroidered Suzhou silk since 2017. (The silk is created in Suzhou, a city in China's Jiangsu Province, which for centuries has been a center of silk weaving and embroidery.)
Founded in 2012, Celadon today offers a bespoke service that allows collectors to design their own embroidered silk-dial timepiece that includes the brand's in-house CH5 movement ($30,000).
'Historically, the luxury goods China produced were porcelain and silk,' Mr. Chee said in a video call from Singapore. 'Suzhou silk is a very fine expression of silk, so I thought that would be a very good art form to incorporate into my watches because the dial is so small that it allows a high level of embroidery without being absurdly expensive.'
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