How rich is the history of women’s watches? At the outset, it’s worth noting two points. One, in respect to how the modern wristwatch came to be, women—not men—are at the centre of the story.
And two, though within the watch industry a lot of bragging is done about which company was the first to do this or the first to do that, there is only one company that can rightfully claim to have designed the first wristwatch as we know it today.
The story begins with Breguet.
Abraham-Louis Breguet set up his watchmaking workshop in Paris in 1775, making Breguet one of the world’s oldest watch brands. Thirty-five years later, in 1810, he’d created something unprecedented for Caroline Murat, queen of Naples: a watch designed to be worn on the wrist. Today, despite the best efforts of
