Hublot might have the deepest Rolodex in watches. The Swiss maker works with enough icons across industries—from soccer star Kylian Mbappé and fashion designer Samuel Ross to BTS idol Jung Kook and new wave legends Depeche Mode—to throw one hell of a house party. But the brand always seems to do its best work with acclaimed visual artists like Takashi Murakami, Sang Bleu, and Richard Orlinski. And today, that knack for blending art and watches just reached its apex, thanks to the release of a new Hublot collaboration with Jeff Koons.
In Koons, Hublot has found a bedfellow that’s every bit as audacious and over-the-top as they are. The duo has come together to create the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, a new watch based on Koons’s most famous sculptures, which reimagine the child’s party favor as sleek, enormous metallic structures. The inflated-looking timepiece comes in three shiny colors: red, blue, and silver, limited to 200 pieces each. At $25,100 a pop, the watches are an absolute steal when you consider the eight-figure sums that Koons’s full-scale balloon works generally command at auction.
As outrageous as it sounds in concept—a Jeff Koons Hublot!—these two challenging flavors actually combined into something rather tasty. The model’s puffed-up dial and metallic sheen feel recognizably Koons-y while also totally working on their own accord. “The challenge was to fundamentally reinterpret the architecture of the Classic Fusion through the visual and sculptural language of inflatable forms,” Koons said in a statement.
