Jeff Koons’s Iconic Balloon Dog Is Now a Watch

Skip to main contentHublot’s latest timepiece lets you wear the artist’s most iconic sculpture on your wrist.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.Koons on 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.KOONS STACK The more you stare at this watch, the more you find reasons to chuckle: the bezel is rounded like an inner tube; a rubber nub sticks out at 9 o’clock like a pup’s tail; a miniature version of the Balloon Dog is used as a counterweight on the seconds hand; and even the visible screws boast balloon-like rounded tops. Is it a $25,000 timepiece or the work of the world’s most talented balloon artist?What’s most interesting about this Koons project is how it attacks one of the decade’s biggest watchmaking trends from an entirely different angle. Independent watchmakers like Rexhep Rexhepi, F.P. Journe, and Simon Brette have become collector and auction-house darlings largely because of their fine-artist-esque qualities: their designs spring from the minds of singular auteurs, and their watches are handmade in extremely limited quantities. Hublot’s approach, meanwhile, leverages its access to art-world stars to enter the same conversation. The Koons watch isn’t just like a piece of art; it’s literally one of the most recognizable contemporary works, made in just 600 pieces across three colors.At the peak of its relevance, an orange version of the Balloon Dog sold for $58.4 million at Christie’s auction house in 2013. But Koons has found plenty of ways to profit off its relevancy since, with H&M handbags printed with its form, a Snapchat partnership that visualized the sculpture through virtual reality, and a collaboration with Evian that put the Balloon Dogs on glass water bottles. There are also floor lamps of various sizes and even speakers. “Art making is only part of what keeps the Koons-industrial complex running,” Nick Haramis wrote in a profile of the artist in The New York Times this weekend. “One might say he’s the art equivalent of a musician with a Las Vegas residency, spending more time revisiting and reiterating old ideas than coming up with new ones.”But many of those partnerships merely recreate or shrink down Koons’s work. The Hublot watch is the first to take the artwork and rethink it comprehensively. Is this the form the Balloon Dog was destined to take all along? Even if you ponied up $58.4 million for the real deal, the best you can do is show your admiring buddies some crappy iPhone photos of it until your next attention-seeking dinner party. The new Hublot Classic Fusion allows you to show off your Koons anywhere, turning your wrist into a walking art gallery.Cam Wolf is GQ’s Watch Editor. He joined the magazine in 2017 after working at Racked (RIP) as the site’s (first!) (and only!) Menswear Editor and Complex in the role of Style News Editor. Shortly into his GQ tenure, he immersed himself in the world of watches and quickly fell ... Read More