Hublot Gave Jeff Koons Its First Automatic Tourbillon and a $25,100 Balloon Dog

Hublot unveiled two watches built with Jeff Koons in New York on September 16 — a partnership the brand first announced on September 9 in Nyon, Switzerland, naming Koons its newest collaborator in a run of artist tie-ins it has kept up since 2011. Both pieces work the same trick differently: one turns Koons' most recognizable sculpture into a wearable object, the other tries to build his ideas about form and transformation into the movement itself.

The easier one to read is the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons: a 42mm case with a rubber tail element at 10:30, a crown shaped like a balloon's inflation valve, and a miniature Balloon Dog riding the counterweight of the seconds hand. It comes in mirror-polished steel or red or blue anodized aluminum, each colorway limited to 200 pieces — 600 total — running Hublot's HUB1710 self-winding movement, priced at $25,100.

The MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons is the more serious piece. Its 44mm octagonal case is sapphire and titanium, machined for 534 hours, set with 202 diamonds and blue sapphires around 2.6 carats total, with a sapphire dome over the dial that nods to Koons' Gazing Ball series. Inside is the HUB9014, a 594-part automatic movement built around a central tourbillon — the first time Hublot has put a central tourbillon on automatic winding. Its last one, the 2023 MP-15 made with Takashi Murakami, used a manual-wind movement wound by turning a special stylus 100 times. It's limited to 30 pieces, priced at $488,000.

Why 14th Street

The MP-14's name traces to 14th Street in New York, where Koons held his first solo exhibition in 1980 — the same year Hublot was founded. Hublot has leaned on that kind of coincidence before to justify a collaboration; here it doubles as the show's setting, with both watches unveiled in New York rather than at a watch fair.

"Hublot and I have always shared fascination for the material sciences ... Hublot uses all the technology of making master timepieces, and also uses the material sciences to transcend the object into representing something that all of us can find even more relevance and meaning," Koons said in the September 9 announcement. Hublot CEO Julien Tornare framed the MP-14 specifically as "the intersection of two parallel visions: one artist deconstructing perception, one manufacture deconstructing matter, both since 1980."

Koons joins a list of artists Hublot has paired with since 2011, including several rounds with Takashi Murakami, and the pattern is the same each time: a familiar image gets reworked into a limited-run object, priced past the point of being a toy. What's different about the MP-14 is that the tie-in isn't just cosmetic — the automatic central tourbillon is a real first for the brand, not just a Koons motif stamped on an existing movement. For a house that's built its identity on stunt collaborations, that's the harder thing to pull off twice.