Can Hermès Make a Watch as Iconic as the Birkin?

I arrived in Miami expecting to see the latest watches from Hermès. But as representatives of the historic Parisian luxury house led a group of us through the Rubell Museum, there was no sign of the timepieces. After passing through rooms showcasing Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Anselm Kiefer on the walls, we came into a room that looked more like an art classroom than a luxury-watch launch.

Instead of being shown new editions of the H08, which Hermès has been slowly sculpting into an icon, I was handed a paintbrush. Present in the room was Cuban American artist José Parlá, along with tables covered in paint, brushes, and scraps of paper torn from street advertisements.

On the walls hung canvases Parlá had already begun and which would serve as the starting point for our own creations. Delighted by the surprise arts-and-crafts, I happily donned my apron. Later that day, Hermès would unveil two new versions of its distinctive H08, the sporty model it debuted in 2021 and has been carefully building up.

The latest pair introduced into the catalog both feature ceramic bezels, one in blue and another in white. They share a shimmering fiberglass case coated in aluminum that gives the watch the look of a tumultuous, gray sea. Troy Barmore Troy Barmore When it was first released, the H08 garnered immediate praise from the collector community and broader market.

Such rave reviews out of the gate are nearly unheard of for a completely new collection. The H08 is defined by its vaguely rectangular case with soft, sloping edges; the straight lines of the watch are contrasted by a round concentric dial. Paired with colorful, complementary rubber straps or the occasional bracelet, the H08 is a collection clearly intended for an active lifestyle without veering into the realm of the tool watch.

Hermès is a Goliath in the luxury world with a massive multibillion-dollar business across leather goods, handbags, and silk scarves. But amid all of its exceptional offerings, watches were never a primary focus; they were something one might add in while buying a Birkin. The H08 is an opportunity for Hermès, a maker of icons, to establish one in a category where it’s still establishing its reputation.

Inside the museum workroom, I set about the task of customizing my canvas. I chose one reminiscent of a rich, red sunset. I sorted through the sheets of torn paper that resembled craggy mountaintops, glued them down, and began to paint.

I felt like I was transported back to my childhood art classes. Troy Barmore Troy Barmore I realized that this was not simply an activity to fill the time but was actually a sophisticated metaphor for how Hermès views the creative process itself, especially as it applies to the development of pieces like the new H08s.

The work is collaborative, iterative, and builds on the concept of what came before to create something new. The base is familiar enough to collectors at this point, but new colors and approaches round out a growing army of H08s so everyone can choose their flavor. “We understood that our way to make this line grow would be to animate it and go deeper into materials,” Laurent Dordet, CEO of La Montre Hermès, the house’s Swiss watchmaking subsidiary.

“It’s part of the playground of H08.” While the H08 already comes in a host of colors and accents, from bright teals and oranges to blues, greens, and yellows, the new bright blue and white variants bring a fresh, almost resortwear vibe to the collection. H08 has given Hermès a foundation to build its limitless creativity on top of.

The fundamental design hasn’t changed at all, but Hermès has continuously renewed it through new colors and materials. Hermès has played with satin brushing, DLC or colored PVD-coated titanium, and carbon composites coated with graphene powder. There are also skeletonized versions of the watch as well as ones with a chronograph (or a stopwatch function).

As the H08 was always intended to be the brand’s far-reaching sport offering, opening up Hermès to new clients and lifestyle applications, the collection quickly became the vehicle for such innovation. But even if Hermès isn’t primarily a watch brand, the house’s world-class artisans never passed off second-rate design.

And the playfulness that pervades the house is essential to the watches too. “That’s what our clients expect from us. Hermès is obsessed with making a beautiful object that will bring comfort and pleasure to its owner,” Dordet says.

“We are not obsessed with having something fun or playful every time. It's a balance between style, elegance, sobriety, subtlety, colors.” Later that evening, at Hermès’s Miami Design District boutique, I encountered another expression of the company’s creative imagination: a smaller version of Jean-Simon Roch’s kinetic sculpture Mysterious Mechanics, which had appeared at the industry’s flagship trade show Watches and Wonders earlier in the year.

Its elaborate system of ropes, pulleys, and moving frames was a theatrical interpretation of mechanical timekeeping, part of the broader cabinet of curiosities that informs Hermès’s creative universe. Troy Barmore As I stood before Mysterious Mechanics, I realized it would be all too easy for Hermès to tap into this same type of whimsy to create an H08 that was loud or multicolored in some obvious embodiment of abstract art.

But that just isn’t how Hermès works. The brand understands that a signature watch is forged over generations. Look at a model like the Rolex Submariner—one of its most valuable assets is that the base design is largely unchanged over 70 years.

There’s a beautiful juxtaposition between the very serious, capital-L luxury done at the highest levels of capability and concept, and the fun-loving, whimsical approach to how Hermès creates. Perhaps that’s why the brand has endured for nearly 200 years. And also why the H08 may just be its next iconic creation.