Jeff Koons has never been particularly interested in good taste. Or, more accurately, he has spent much of his career questioning who gets to define it. The American artist has turned balloon animals, vacuum cleaners and kitsch figurines into some of contemporary art’s most recognisable works, becoming one of its wealthiest and most polarising figures in the process. In 2019, his gleaming stainless-steel sold at Christie’s for $91.1 million (£71.3 million), then the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.

Koons the pop-cultural phenomenon has often sat uneasily alongside Koons the artist. Depending on whom you ask, his work is Neo-Pop, conceptual, gloriously kitsch or simply very expensive stuff for very rich people. Critic Jerry Saltz once described his sculptures as “huge, shiny baubles for billionaires”. But Koons is also an esoteric conceptualist and a marketing genius in the tradition of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, as fluent in commerce as he is in art. Over the years, he has collaborated with everyone from Louis Vuitton and BMW to Dom Pérignon, H&M and Supreme. Few living artists have so successfully blurred the lines between museum object, luxury commodity and pop-cultural spectacle.

Koons and Hublot reworked the familiar architecture of the Hublot Classic Fusion watch.

Courtesy of Hublot

Which makes Hublot a rather perfect match. The Swiss watchmaker has never exactly made a virtue of restraint. Its watches are big, technically ambitious and definite conversation starters; a brand built on the idea that unexpected materials, colours and cultural references belong together simply because somebody had the nerve to combine them. Like Koons, Hublot understands that provoking a strong reaction can be considerably more interesting than inspiring polite approval.

Their new limited-edition Classic Fusion Balloon Dog takes one of Koons’s most famous motifs and quite literally inflates the watch around it. Rather than simply placing a miniature Balloon Dog on the dial, Koons and Hublot have reworked the familiar architecture of the Classic Fusion through the soft, swollen geometry of an inflatable sculpture. Domed surfaces appear throughout, the crown resembles a balloon valve, and even the padded leather strap has an appealingly puffy quality. Available in mirror-polished stainless steel or red and blue anodised aluminium, the watch is tactile, bulbous and extremely shiny.

“Balloon Dog (Magenta)“, by Jeff Koons at the Le Monde Comme Il Va exhibition at Bourse De Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris, 2024. (Photo by Luc Castel/GettyImages)

There is something particularly timely about all this volume. After years of tasteful beige and endless aspirations to CBK minimalism, the pendulum of watch taste seems to be swinging back towards excess. Heavily gem-set Richard Mille designs have become highly coveted, brightly coloured Rolex Oyster Perpetuals trade at premiums, and the more outré watch designs of the 1970s have found a new generation of collectors. Shine, colour and a little vulgarity are beginning to look good again. Koons, of course, has been there all along.

But then Koons has always understood the strange alchemy that occurs when art, celebrity and commerce collide. He has built a career on objects that command record-breaking prices while remaining instantly legible as pop culture. Hublot operates in not entirely dissimilar territory: technically serious watchmaking delivered with little interest in discretion.