MOVADO
Founded in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1881 by the nineteen-year-old Achille Ditesheim, the house took the name Movado in 1905, Esperanto for always in motion. Its early reputation rested on technical ingenuity: the Polyplan of 1912, with a movement bent across three planes to follow the curve of the wrist, and the Ermeto travel watch, wound by the action of opening its own protective case.
The Museum Dial
In 1947 the American designer Nathan George Horwitt proposed a dial stripped of every numeral, marked only by a single gold dot at twelve to represent the sun at noon. The Museum of Modern Art in New York added it to its collection, giving the design the name it still carries. It remains one of the few watch dials recognised as a work of industrial design in its own right.
Design as Continuity
Movado has continued to commission artists and designers, among them Andy Warhol, Yaacov Agam and James Rosenquist, treating the watch as a surface for contemporary work. The Museum dial anchors the collection, and the restraint it established still governs the brand’s visual language.