Hublot × Jeff Koons, a tribute to the world of design

During Geneva Watch Days, we were invited to the Hublot boutique in Geneva and introduced to a collaboration we hadn’t seen before. In front of us were three versions created with Jeff Koons, finished in silver, blue and red, with the artist’s familiar Balloon Dog appearing as a small detail at the centre.

Spending time with them, the collaboration started to feel less like an attempt to create a traditional watch and more like a tribute to the wider world of design. That is also a world we can imagine Hublot taking a great deal of inspiration from.

The brand has always been willing to look beyond conventional watchmaking, whether through materials, colour, art or the people it chooses to collaborate with, and bringing someone like Jeff Koons into that environment feels quite natural.

As people who care a lot about design ourselves, that is probably what we appreciate most about the project. The watch itself is playful, colourful and clearly created for a very particular collector, but the bigger idea is more interesting to us. It shows a brand looking outside its own industry for creative influences.

Bringing Koons into the watch

Jeff Koons has built much of his career around taking familiar forms and changing the way we perceive them through scale, materials, colour and immaculate surfaces. Works such as Balloon Dog, Rabbit and Puppy have become instantly recognisable far beyond the traditional art world, which makes translating his work into something as small as a watch an interesting challenge.

Hublot hasn’t attempted to reproduce one of those works across the entire dial. Instead, a miniature Balloon Dog sits among the central hands, while a signature appears above six o’clock. The more obvious Koons influence comes through the broader design, particularly the rounded forms surrounding the case and the highly reflective surfaces.

Koons describes a shared fascination with material science and with creating an object that becomes more than the sum of its individual parts.

Hublot has been collaborating with artists since 2011, and its willingness to experiment with unusual materials and manufacturing techniques has been part of the brand for considerably longer. In that context, Koons doesn’t feel like an unusual person for Hublot to invite into the room.

Silver, blue or red?

The three watches are essentially different colour interpretations of the same idea. Silver is highly reflective, red carries the strongest block of colour, while blue combines its metallic case with a darker strap.

Seeing all three together, though, we did have a favourite. We normally have a weakness for blue, but this time it was red.

The watch and the outfit

There was something about seeing the red version on the wrist that made the concept particularly easy to understand. We found ourselves thinking about what someone would wear with it.

We could easily imagine a woman wearing it with a very clean outfit and allowing the watch to provide the colour, although the same could obviously work on a man with the right style.

It becomes almost an accessory in the fashion sense of the word, where the shape and colour have as much influence on the overall impression as the fact that it tells the time. That may not be how we normally talk about watches, but for this particular collaboration it feels appropriate.

A collector’s object

This is also where we think the audience for the collaboration becomes clearer. We see it primarily as a collector’s piece.

• Someone with a serious Hublot collection may enjoy having something that sits completely outside the more familiar pieces in that collection.
• A Jeff Koons collector or someone particularly interested in his work could approach it from an entirely different direction.
• There is also the collector who just enjoys unusual design objects.

For any of those people, the appeal doesn’t necessarily have to begin with traditional watchmaking. The fact that it exists somewhere between a watch, an art collaboration and something connected to fashion is part of what gives it its character.

That doesn’t mean it will appeal to everyone, and it isn’t necessarily the part of the watch world we personally feel most passionate about either. There are watches we would choose because of a movement, a historical reference, an unusual complication or because of how they represent a particular period of watchmaking. This collaboration asks to be considered from another perspective.

Hublot has now launched the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons and published specifications and pricing for all three versions. In this case, those specifications aren’t what shaped our impression of the watches in Geneva anyway.

What happens on the wrist

What mattered more was actually handling them. The blue versions were available for us to look at closely in the hand, while we were able to see the silver and red versions on the wrist. Despite everything happening visually, the watch sat comfortably, and the strap felt well integrated with the overall design.

That physical experience helped the project make more sense. These are obviously watches designed to attract attention, particularly in red or reflective silver, but they don’t feel like static art objects that happen to have a strap attached. They are designed to be worn.

The red version demonstrated that best for us. Its colour is impossible to separate from the person wearing it, which is why we kept returning to the idea of clothing and personal style. Put it together with the right outfit and the watch becomes part of the entire composition. For a collaboration involving Jeff Koons, that feels much more interesting than treating the Balloon Dog as the entire story.

Looking outside watchmaking

We have always felt that Hublot deserves more credit for this side of what it does. You don’t have to love every design to appreciate the pace at which the brand continues to explore new materials, colours and creative partnerships. More importantly, it seems comfortable looking outside the traditional watch industry for ideas.

The design world is an enormous source of inspiration, and we can imagine its influence across much of Hublot’s work. Working with Jeff Koons makes that relationship particularly visible. He comes from a completely different creative discipline, yet ideas around materials, surfaces, colour and manufacturing provide an obvious point where the two worlds can meet.

Leaving the boutique

We left the boutique with the red as our favourite, despite normally being drawn towards blue, but the colour wasn’t really the main thing we took away from the experience. It was the willingness to make something like this at all.

The Jeff Koons collaboration occupies another part of the collecting world, where watches can overlap with art, fashion and industrial design. That may not be where our own passion for watches begins, but we like that Hublot is willing to go there.

For an industry that often looks to its own past for inspiration, there is something refreshing about a brand that is equally comfortable looking outside it.

Price and availability

Production. Limited to 200 pieces per colour.

Retail. €24,600, as of Sep 2026 (Hublot product page, on request)