KONSTANTIN CHAYKIN
Konstantin Chaykin is a Moscow watchmaker and the only Russian member of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants, which he joined in 2010 and went on to lead as its president from 2016 to 2019. Largely self-taught, he built his reputation on complicated clocks and watches of genuine mechanical originality, including a calendar that computes the date of Orthodox Easter. He is now known worldwide for a watch face that smiles back.
The Joker and the Wristmons
The Joker, launched in 2017, displays hours and minutes as two eyes and the moon phase as a mouth, turning a legibility layout into a character. It became one of the most widely imitated designs of its decade and spawned the Wristmon family of variations. Beneath the humour is a properly engineered module built on the workshop’s own construction.
Complications Beyond the Joke
Chaykin’s wider body of work includes astronomical clocks and computus mechanisms — among them the most complicated clock ever built in Russia — produced in tiny numbers from his Moscow workshop. That output, technically ambitious and entirely independent, earned him standing among peers long before the Joker made him famous.