Watch collaborations have saturated the market in recent years, but when I heard Jeff Koons was getting involved in designing a model, my ears perked up. His Celebration series featuring his Balloon Dog sculptures makes up one of the most memorable works of art to emerge in my lifetime as a child of the 90s. I wasn’t surprised this would be the source of inspiration for the watches he’d create.
The artist and self-proclaimed weirdo in me has always appreciated the daring and disruptive nature of Koons’ creations, but to the masses, they’ve been polarizing. It was clear that his approach to design wouldn’t be the right fit for just any watch brand – it would need to be with a maker who was equally daring, disruptive, and perhaps even polarizing itself. Enter Hublot, who has long received scrutiny for its audacious models that buck Swiss tradition. “I remember maybe about 15 years ago, I was at an event for the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and I had a conversation with Bernard Arnault,” Koons recalls. “He said, ‘you know, Jeff, you should make a watch,’ but we never did. Years later, our sons became friends, and Frederic said to my son Sean, ‘your dad should make a watch – Hublot has a lot of interest in partnering with him.’ And I was really excited about this idea of working with new materials and working with time.” 
All that said, the goal has never been a shock factor – it’s about authenticity – Koons’ identity as an artist and Hublot’s ethos as a brand. “I’m an intuitive artist,” affirms Koons, “If somebody just tries to make something outrageous, disjointed in some way, or clashing in some way, it doesn’t succeed. It has to be natural. It has to come from curiosity, from an interest in everything.” With these guiding principles, the duo collaborated over the course of two years on translating Koons’ works and design language into the constraints of a wristwatch, and ultimately, the Balloon Dog-inspired timepieces took shape.
Many of Koons’ creations are monumental in size, with the largest Balloon Dog sculptures towering 10 feet. So, scaling down to the millimeter while retaining the essence of Koons’ artistic expression was no small feat. “Plato would always say that the first thing you deal with in art is scale,” explains Koons, “and what I loved about working on a timepiece is that we’re really dealing with scale. A watch is really a fascinating object,” Koons continues, “It scales down or gives definition to this very vast concept of the universe we call time through concrete principles of mathematics and engineering. Without timepieces, we wouldn’t have this understanding.”
Co-creating his first watch wasn’t the first time Koons felt a connection to timepieces. Like almost each and every one of us, Koons had several very specific memories of watches in his life. “My grandfather – my mother’s father, always wore a pocket watch, and I remember being fascinated by it,” shares Koons. “Then as a child, my first watch was a Timex, and over the years, I’ve been gifted watches on different occasions that are very special to me. But probably my most significant memory is from a conversation with Ileana Sonnabend, a dealer of mine until she passed away,” Koons continues. “She said, ‘Jeff, look at clocks, look at timepieces because they use different allegories that are very interesting, and they will give you a new understanding of time.’ So, when I would go to museums, I’d always be looking for exhibits dealing with timepieces, or I would go to clock museums, and I tried to embed these observations into this collaboration.” Each of these parts – Koons’ sculptures, his own relationship to time, his artistic philosophy – combined with Hublot’s ethos, expertise in material play, and technical watchmaking prowess has culminated in a piece of wearable art: the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog.
This trio of bold 42mm watches transforms the traditional sleek architecture of the Classic Fusion into a playful design with inflated geometries, soft domed surfaces, and convex lines to create the illusion of a watch shaped by air pressure. To elicit this sensation of volume and tension, multiple elements have been reshaped, from the sapphire crystal and titanium screw heads to the convex “puffy” dial construction and sculptural case architecture. Every surface is reworked to preserve the impression of internal pressure, extending through the smooth, padded metallic leather strap. As a nod to both the dog and the balloon, signature details include a balloon-inspired crown in rubber-molded aluminum, a flexible decorative “balloon tail” at 10:30, a Balloon Dog-shaped seconds hand counterweight, and inflated Super-LumiNova indexes and hands.
Koons has often explored the relationship between the art and the observer through his works, namely his Gazing Ball series. Each sculpture in the collection is anchored by a blue glass ball that reflects the artwork, the room, and the observer all at once – meaning you don’t just look at the art, you become part of it. This series went on to inspire a second and even more exclusive collaboration with Hublot, called the MP-14 Origin in which the watchmaker’s first automatic central tourbillon is housed beneath a transparent blue sapphire dome reminiscent of the one from Koons’ sculptures. Now, the connection between the art and the observer – or in this case, wearer – deepens and becomes even more intimate as the “sculpture” is worn on the body. “You know, art is really something that happens within us – art is really when we experience the essence of our own potential,” Koons asserts, “When you’re looking at a painting or a sculpture, a piece of clothing or a watch, it’s what you envision for your own future and what you can be in the future for the next generation. I know I expanded my parameters as an individual and as an artist for works I’ll make in the future by being involved in the creation of these timepieces.”
The Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons trio is available today in three colors – red, blue, and silver – with each being limited to 200 pieces and priced at $25,000. In addition, the MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons is even more exclusive, produced in a run of just 20 pieces and priced at a whopping $488,000. For more information, head over directly to Hublot.
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