ingenlivsgnist
The swiss watch brand Jaeger-LeCoultre may not be the most well known watch brand within the industry, but is still considered one of the absolute top watch manufacturers in the world. Where does this luxury watch brand place within the design industry?
For many, watches can simply be put into one category of design, fashion design. Although this is not wrong, especially for a brand like Jaeger-LeCoultre. This is a watchmaker that not only designs the more classic looking dress watches like this Master Ultra Thin Moon. They do also design more extravagant time pieces like this Rendez-Vous Celestial. I would say that this is by all means a fashion piece.
It is when you take a closer look at the engineering and the design of the move- ment underneath the surface of these watches that you see that a watchmaker like Jaeger-LeCoultre is not only a fashion design brand. Although a watch movement like this 381 is beautiful it’s not exactly what you would call fashion. One could argue that with the design of the actual watch movement Jaeger-LeCoultre is also touching on some aspects of industrial design. These watch movements aren’t exactly designed for mass production as they are still a combination of machine and hand made, but they are used by other watch brands in their watches. If you look at one of the cycles within industrial design, art – engineering – business, one could say that a mechanical watch movement pretty accurately, pun intended, touches on every aspects of this cycle.
A watch brand like Jaeger-LeCoultre, although not the most exclusive watch- maker on the market, still uses exclusivity to a high degree to compete with other brands. This is of course not the case for all of their watches, but with pieces like the Rendez-Vous Celestial mentioned earlier exclusivity is the main selling point, with a limited amount of pieces, in this case only 18 being manufactured.\
The brands approach to design is to a very large degree focused on the details. This is the case with all of high quality watchmaking and possible where this industry distance themselves from other design fields. The details is of course important in many fields of design but in the art of watchmaking the attention to detail is one of the core elements. Jaeger-LeCoultre watch movements are com- bined of many hundred parts and even the parts you cant see are hand decorated and polished to perfection.
Watchmaking may not be what you first think of when someone says design. But looking at the different aspects of the process and how these artist, designers and engineers make these watches come to life. One can see that the art of watchmak- ing is a part of the design industry, maybe a stranger part of the industry, but a part nonetheless.
https://www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/us/en/home-page.html
Making sense of art and design industries 
