Franck Muller Vanguard Kelly Dabbah Electric Feel: Art on the Wrist

Key Highlights

• Stainless steel Vanguard tonneau case: 42.5mm wide, 52.7mm long, with electric blue side inserts
• Dial artwork by multidisciplinary maximalist artist Kelly Dabbah, featuring horse motifs and electric blue accents
• High-definition sublimation transfer process: pigments fired at ~160°C penetrate the pre-lacquered dial surface permanently
• Hand-applied numerals produced through sublimation transfer, each requiring precise handwork by Franck Muller dial makers
• Automatic movement with 191 components; date function via discreet aperture
• Integrated strap secured by two hidden screws, with edge stitching, creating a flush case-to-strap transition
• Designed, crafted, and assembled at Watchland manufacture, Genthod

Editorial Take

Franck Muller has long treated the dial as architecture rather than surface. With the Vanguard Kelly Dabbah Electric Feel, the Geneva manufacture takes that premise further by inviting an external artistic voice into the composition, then exercising the discipline not to let it overwhelm the structure. The result is a watch that carries genuine creative tension rather than the usual decorator’s polish associated with artist collaborations.

Kelly Dabbah works across collage, illustration, and maximalist visual storytelling. Her signature language, dense with imagery and colour, could easily have produced a dial that reads as a canvas print strapped to a case. What saves the Electric Feel from that fate is the decision to confine her motifs within Franck Muller’s emblematic numeral forms rather than let them spread freely across the dial field. Horses emerge within the numerals, symbolising motion and force. Electric blue accents introduce energy and contrast against the restrained overall palette. The composition holds. For those already familiar with the Vanguard Crazy Hours Jisbar collaboration, this piece takes a different register: more controlled, more masculine, less playful.

The Making: Sublimation at 160°C

The technical process behind the dial is worth understanding on its own terms.

Each design is printed onto a transfer film that adheres to the numerals under combined heat and vacuum pressure. At approximately 160°C, the pigments pass directly from solid to gaseous state and penetrate the pre-lacquered dial and numeral surfaces. As they cool, they solidify deep within the material rather than sitting as a layer on top. The consequence is a finish that carries genuine depth, with colour fused into the structure of the numeral rather than applied over it. Franck Muller’s dial makers then hand-apply each numeral individually, a process that demands years of training and an eye for alignment that no automated workflow can replicate. The numerals function simultaneously as time markers and as carriers of the artistic composition, a duality that defines this watch’s visual logic.

Design & Mechanics

The Vanguard case is Franck Muller’s most recognisable silhouette: a tonneau form with flowing contours that sits closer to sculpture than to conventional watchcase geometry. At 42.5mm wide and 52.7mm long, the stainless steel version of the Electric Feel occupies the wrist with authority. Blue inserts on each lateral face of the case pick up the electric blue of the dial accents, creating a visual continuity that prevents the case from reading as a neutral container for the dial artwork.

Inside, an automatic movement composed of 191 components drives both timekeeping and a date function displayed through a discreet aperture. Franck Muller positions this movement as a vehicle for consistent, reliable precision, designed and assembled at the Watchland manufacture in Genthod alongside grand-complication calibres that have produced world premieres including the first tri-axial tourbillon. The Vanguard Aero Revolution 3 illustrates how far that technical ambition extends across the Vanguard family. For the Electric Feel, the movement is purposefully restrained in specification, allowing the dial to remain the primary statement.

The Watch in Context

The integrated strap completes the proposition. Secured by two hidden screws rather than conventional spring bars, it flows from the case without interruption, with edge stitching that reinforces both its durability and the overall finish quality. On the wrist, the effect is of a single object rather than a case with a strap attached.

Franck Muller’s artist-collaboration programme spans a wide spectrum of aesthetic registers. The Cintree Curvex Gatsby occupies a very different visual territory. The Electric Feel sits at a specific intersection: the controlled masculinity of the Vanguard architecture meets the expressive potential of Dabbah’s collage-driven world. Neither overwhelms the other. The blue inserts, the sublimation-fused horse motifs, the 191-component movement ticking behind them: together they form a watch that rewards close attention rather than demanding it from across the room. For the GCC collector who appreciates craft over spectacle, that restraint is precisely the point.

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