The GPHG Mumbai exhibit showcased 78 exceptional watches across 14 categories, including groundbreaking designs like Konstantin Chaykin's ThinKing Mystery and Parmigiani Fleurier's Tonda PF Chronographe Mystérieux. The event highlighted innovation, craftsmanship, and artistry, offering a glimpse into the future of watchmaking ahead of the prestigious Geneva awards.
There are thirty seven days to the Oscars of watchmaking, Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) takes place in Geneva on 7 November 2026. This year, for the first time, the annual GPH exhibition has come to India, displaying in Mumbai from September 28 to October 1, 2026.
The India wing of the exhibition was organised in collaboration with Ethos Limited and displayed 78 of the 84 watches currently running across fourteen categories. Esquire India attended the press preview at The St. Regis Mumbai on the opening day. Here's what we have to report.
At 1.65 mm thick, the ThinKing Mystery is dubbed the thinnest series-produced mechanical watch in the world, and the case and the watch are the same object, with no separate movement hiding inside. There is no crown at all, which says plenty about how seriously the thickness was taken. So where does the movement go? You use a separate handheld winding device to wind the watch, which itself is thing enough that you can simply wear the device under the watch.
The PF Mystérieux and ThinKing Mystery together might be the most interesting watches from the last Watches and Wonders to compete at the GPHG this year. At rest, this looks like a perfectly polite three-hand Tonda PF, Press the monopusher at 7:30 and two more coaxial hands fan out across the full dial to time an event. Parmigiani built an entirely new calibre, the PF053, because no existing construction could manage this disappearing act. Unfortunately your humble reporter could not capture this beauty with all five at work. The three hands will have to do for now.
The Christopher Ward C12 Loco debuts CW-003, Christopher Ward's second in-house movement, a hand-wound calibre with an exposed free-sprung balance wheel and a six-day power reserve (144 hours, for the exact-minded). A floating sapphire ring carries glowing indices that seem to hover above the dial, all inside a redesigned 41 mm case with steeper lugs for comfort. Even more impressive is the fact that it pulls this off at a fraction of the cost than say, an MB&F would.
Every dial starts life in Josh Shapiro's Los Angeles workshop, where grade-2 titanium is engine-turned by hand in a new "Lightning" guilloché pattern. It then travels to Kuala Lumpur, where Ming Thein colours it with a butane torch, no paint involved. Only about one in three dials survives the process. Lightning never strikes twice, and the dials follow that rule faithfully, since no two come out identical.
All eight planets orbit the sun on this dial in eccentric paths that follow real time, a complication Christiaan van der Klaauw first drew by hand across some 10 to 15 A3 sheets at ten times scale. The mechanism runs through 3,338 gear teeth, and the outer planets turn through reduction gears. This Silicium edition is limited to six pieces, made in collaboration with Revolution, in a 44 mm case of 316L steel hardened by low-temperature carbon diffusion to roughly 1,200 Vickers.
This is Grand Seiko's smallest diver yet, at 40.8 mm across and 12.9 mm thick in high-intensity titanium. The new calibre 9RB1 is rated to ±20 seconds a year, a small enough drift to blame on the tide (which happens to be what "ushio" means).
This is a pocket watch, and as unapologetic as it gets. You get 50 mm of hand-engraved platinum hung on a handmade platinum chain, with engraved panels that include portraits of the founders. Inside beats the new hand-wound Calibre 1150, which packs 47 functions and 30 complications, among them a Grande Sonnerie with Supersonnerie, a minute repeater, a flying tourbillon, a split-seconds flyback chronograph and a semi-Gregorian perpetual calendar. Flip it over and the Universal Calendar ties the sun's calendar to the moon's, with lunisolar cycles bridging the two.
Iced out to the point of blindness, Chopard's Mystery Nut is a pendant watch shaped like a walnut, made of rose gold, titanium and white gold, with a secret timepiece hidden at its heart. It took nearly 600 hours of artisanal work, and it exists as a single unique piece, shortlisted in the Jewellery category at this year's GPHG.