Bvlgari has always operated by its own logic. Where the Swiss tradition prizes restraint and horological gravitas, Rome brings colour, audacity, and a jewellery maker’s instinct for the dramatic. Walking through their space at Watches and Wonders 2026, that logic is immediately apparent. The star of the show this year is a smaller Octo Finissimo that required an entirely new movement. The supporting cast: an ultra-thin tourbillon in platinum and a Serpenti dripping in coloured stones.
Octo Finissimo 37
Since its introduction in 2014, the Octo Finissimo has been one of the most architecturally considered watches of the modern era. It has also apparently been a touch too large for some wrists, yet I say this as someone who greatly admires a larger watch. Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, Bvlgari’s product creation executive director, is candid about it. After three or four years of hearing “I love it, but it’s too big,” the 37mm has been a welcome arrival.
What is rarely understood is the complexity required to get there. Reducing a watch’s size is not a matter of scaling a CAD file. The existing movement does not simply fit within a smaller case, which meant developing an entirely new one from the ground up. The calibre BVF 100 is the result: an ultra-thin automatic movement measuring 2.35mm in height with a 72-hour power reserve. Only two components were carried over from the original: the platinum rotor and the balance wheel. Everything else was re-engineered from the beginning.
The bracelet has been reworked, too, composed of two components with a new push-button clasp that improves both comfort and proportionality. Viewing it alongside its larger sibling was strangely confusing. Visually, the Octo Finissimo 37 reads the same, with the same geometry, faceting unchanged, identity uncompromised. But it’s clear the slightly smaller face means there is now an Octo for every wrist.
Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon Platinum
The Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon is already among the more remarkable objects in contemporary horology. At 1.85mm total thickness, it is proof that a tourbillon need not announce itself through additional bulk, that the most demanding complication in watchmaking can be achieved with discipline rather than drama. Seeing it in platinum at Geneva, it becomes something else: cooler in tone, denser in presence, and more explicitly a serious collector’s acquisition. The Ultra in platinum is not a new idea executed differently. It is the same extraordinary idea elevated by a single material choice into something rarer, quieter, and harder to set aside.
Serpenti Tubogas Studs
The Tubogas technique has been central to Bvlgari since the 1940s, a signature method of wrapping gold wire into fluid, flexible structures without solder, requiring a precision that makes the finished piece feel almost implausibly effortless. The Serpenti has been coiling around wrists for nearly as long. The Studs Capsule introduces a third element: the graphic, blunt language of stud hardware, industrial in character and deliberately at odds with the sinuous links surrounding it. In person, the tension between the two reads beautifully. Gold and steel in considered conversation, jewellery and industrial design finding, against reasonable expectation, common ground. The kind of piece only Bvlgari would think to make, and only Bvlgari would make look this easy.
Serpenti Aeterna
If the Octo Finissimo represents Bvlgari at its most architecturally precise, the Serpenti Aeterna is the maison at its most unapologetically itself. Pavé-set from head to tail in coloured gemstones, it plays with colour, light and texture with the confidence of a house that has been perfecting this craft since before most watch brands existed. It was one of those pieces at the fair that turned heads, and rightly so. The Serpenti has been reinventing itself since its introduction. This is perhaps its most vivid chapter yet. It earns the phrase joie de vivre in the way that only genuine craft can: not by claiming it, but by making it impossible not to feel.
