Issue 209: Back To Basel We Go...
Will the watch world embrace Basilia, a new trade fair for 2027? Also: why would we assume The Escapement will be watch geek Fyre Festival?
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter for people who will never care about seeing me rate a celebrity’s watch collection. This week, I’m talking about two proposed events, each at opposite ends of the trade-consumer spectrum and each attracting a little bit of scepticism about their viability. Mostly, I’m curious to see if there can be a coherent case for a new trade fair in Basel, but I am also curious that people would think the idea of bringing people who love watches together would be so risky. Enjoy!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Back To Basel?
News landed quite abruptly this week of a new trade fair for the watch and jewellery industries, to take place in Basel in April 2027. The exact dates are TBC, as the event is intending to run consecutively after the trade-focussed first week of Watches & Wonders / Geneva Watch Week, as the main event and its fringe fairs have become collectively known.
Basilia, as it will be called1, is set to take place in Hall 2 of Messeplatz, an exhibition and conference centre best known in this parish as the former home of Baselworld, the watch industry trade fair that dates back in some form or other to 1917 (although the Swiss only started inviting exhibitors from other countries in 19722) and came to an ignominious end in 2019 as the global pandemic finished what a massive exhibitor exodus had already started.
The event is being jointly organised by MCH Group, the body behind Baselworld (and that still hosts, rather more successfully, Art Basel and other events) and Informa Markets, a subdivision of Informa that runs hundreds of trade fairs around the world from the luxurious (Monaco Yacht Show; Dubai Air Show) to the practical (World of Concrete; the Farm Progress Show). In this context, Informa Markets is leaning on its experience in jewellery events, including Jewellery and Gem World Hong Kong. The partnership, and by extension the event as a whole, is being billed as ‘Europe meets Asia’ with obvious implications - one might even say synergies3 - for the world of watches.
For many of us, it will be impossible to frame this as anything other than ‘Baselworld is back’ - the same organiser, the same venue, the same time of year… I can hear the music playing on repeat in the Messeplatz already. Smell the cigarettes and sausages, avoid the trams, jostle for a Feldschlossen in one of the worst and most expensive pubs I have ever known4.
But let us not be tempted by nostalgia. Baselworld has been gone just long enough for us to start to forget if not actively forgive its worst sins, and at Watches & Wonders this year ‘bring back Basel’ was a pretty popular refrain. This has been prompted by the algae-like expansion of Watches & Wonders and its peripheral pirates, and I was among many who bemoaned the fact that one person simply cannot cover enough ground. However, Baselworld was still worse. Appointments every half an hour without a break, unless you took the radical action of scheduling yourself a bathroom visit in advance, miles upon miles of warm dark exhibition hall, and when you went outside you’d either be run over by WatchAnish’s Lambo, deafened by an oompah band or catch lung cancer from the sales execs (and Thierry Stern, who was reliably stationed by a side door whenever he could get out) gasping down full strength nicotine. You paid a few thousand francs to some students to rent their crappy apartment, proximity to the fair your primary search criteria on AirBnb (presumably the students took themselves off for a week in the Maldives or the like). The food was practically non-existent - most of us survived on chocolates, sugar-free breath mints, espresso and champagne.
Say any of this to a fellow survivor, however, and their eyes will light up. “Yes,” they’ll say. “Wasn’t it great!” My first job was for a magazine editor who was universally hated and despised by his staff, apart from the art director, who flirted with him just enough to convince him he might have a chance but really despised him just like the rest of us. I was there for five years, and I have never experienced the camaraderie like it anywhere since; we found a sense of resilience and kinship in working for such a minor despot. Baselworld is a bit like that; if you spent years there, you are proud that you got through it, adapted to its idiotic quirks and got your job done in spite of the absence of such niceties as functional wi-fi, plentiful drinking water or chairs. There is a totally undeserved machismo about the whole thing, a blue-suited Stockholm syndrome. By any measurable metric the press, in particular, have it so much better at Watches & Wonders, and all we do is moan. It is true that the business of covering a trade fair as a journalist has changed significantly, and not necessarily for the better, but that’s another story.
All of which is to say that I am skeptical of a Baselworld revival. Extremely so. But I am prepared to admit that the status quo is not perfect, and the organisers say they are expecting to have 400+ exhibitors, so whether I like it or not this is clearly happening. So let’s try and give it an objective assessment, positives as well as negatives.
