Fashion has always loved its icons: the little black dress, the “it” bag, the perfectly worn-in boyfriend jeans. Watches, too, have had their moments—and Breitling has been part of more of them than most realize. Time and again, the brand has struck fashion’s cadence just right, appearing on popular wrists, runways, and red carpets.
1940s-1950s – Geneva
The 1940s ushered in one of fashion’s great return-to-glamour moments. After the austerity of wartime, silhouettes softened, jewelry returned, and style became a language of hope again. It was in this moment that third-generation founder Willy Breitling introduced the Premier. For the first time, precision and elegance shared the same dial. The Premier embodied the era’s renewed appetite for beauty, a moment which also marked Breitling’s first women’s wrist chronographs.
Within this shift was Willy’s wife, Beatrice Breitling, whom he married in the 1950s. Known for her poise and aesthetic sensibility, she balanced practicality and elegance, wearing refined (and sometimes hidden) cocktail watches that shaped Breitling’s new direction. She was, in many ways, a style influencer decades before the term was coined. More than a sounding board for creative decisions, she embodied Willy’s belief that practicality and beauty weren’t mutually exclusive.
The result were watches—and a new design philosophy—that would define Breitling’s future.
1960s-1970s – London
The late 1950s marked the golden age of civil aviation. As commercial air travel became more accessible, Breitling moved from cockpit to cabin. The Navitimer, AVI Co-Pilot, Transocean, and later the Chrono-matic became companions of the emerging global elite: actors, musicians, and artists who defined the jet-set era.
This was the moment when a watch could signal that you belonged, not to one city, but to the world. And only the worldliest wore Breitling watches.
Gregory Peck, the epitome of confidence, who played Audrey Hepburn’s love interest in Roman Holiday (1953) wore one. So did cinema’s coolest spies: Sean Connery as James Bond in Thunderball (1965), and Raquel Welch in Fathom (1967).
Another moment that has lived on in pop-culture lore came with Mick Jagger. On May 12, 1971, he wore a Breitling Chrono-matic ref. 2112 to his wedding to Bianca Jagger in Saint-Tropez. The Rolling Stones had fled the U.K.’s punishing tax rates and decamped to the French Riviera. The one-time haven for artistic outsiders, was by then the stage for see-and-be-seen glamour. Keith Richards later joked that Jagger “wanted a quiet wedding, so he chose Saint-Tropez in the middle of summer.” The couple had to push through paparazzi to reach the church. It was a spectacle that made headlines worldwide, and Breitling was there.
Breitling timepieces were no longer just pilot’s tools but passports to the glamour of a new world. These years redefined Breitling as functional yet cool, engineered yet expressive. It’s a duality that still defines the brand.
1980s – Milan
Italian fashion entered Breitling’s world when sportswear label Ellesse commissioned a co-branded watch, bringing architect Claudio Giovagnoni and rally champion-slash-businessman Gino Macaluso into the fold. With their flair for avant-garde design and modern detail, they shaped the Ellesse collaboration and, in doing so, inadvertently set the stage for a new creation. The Ellesse bracelet, built from roller links that resembled tubes of tennis balls, became the foundation for what would evolve into the signature of a watch first created for Italy’s Frecce Tricolori aerobatic team: the Chronomat. A piece robust enough for flight yet refined enough for dinner in town.
From his base in Turin, Macaluso quickly recognized the watch’s potential in Italy’s fashion capitals. After establishing his company, Tradema, he became Breitling’s distributor for the Italian market. Macaluso introduced editions with padded leather straps inspired by the handle of his father’s Italian briefcase. The designs were assertive, came in striking colors, and in an era of big silhouettes and even bigger ambitions, Breitling fit right in, combining confidence with an unmistakable sense of style.
By the late ’80s, New York had caught up with Milan’s chic minimalism. Transatlantic travel brought home a new appreciation for the European way of life, and suddenly la dolce vita became aspirational. Interiors shifted from brown-and-orange carpeting to white walls and clean lines—just as architect Adolf Loos had predicted in 1908: “The development of culture is concurrent with the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use.”
1990s – New York
After a decade of “more is more,” less suddenly became more. The TV series Friends captured that very moment and became the defining style reference of the decade, shaping what millions of people thought was cool. On Courteney Cox’s wrist: a Breitling Chrono Sextant—essentially a more delicately sized Chronomat. Another TV icon, Jerry Seinfeld, regularly wore Breitling watches on his eponymous hit show.
As watch journalist and Chronomat expert Gerard Tubb notes: “Ernest Schneider had intended the Chronomat as a hardcore tool watch, but it very quickly took on a life of its own.”
The Chronomat became the watch of the decade. Vogue even depicted the Chronomat ref. 13047 worn on an ankle, as part of a spread with ’90s supermodel Cindy Crawford, and named it the “nineties status symbol.” These were not product placements but cultural touchpoints, moments when Breitling didn’t follow trends but tapped into the Zeitgeist that defined them.
As Tubb recalls: “By the ’90s, the Chronomat was no longer ahead of its time. Fashion had caught up. It sold itself again and again.”
2010s–2020s – Paris
Fast-forward to today. While some of Breitling’s popular image remains big and bold, its dialog with fashion has always been intrinsic, not incidental.
In recent years, Breitling has continued to surface at precisely the moments when culture is looking. On the wrists of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Selma Blair, the watches take on different energies—rugged, refined, or rebellious—but all share the same quiet confidence and relevance in fashion.
In 2024, Breitling collaborated with Victoria Beckham on a capsule collection that echoed the palette of her Spring/Summer 2024 show in Paris, a refined yet playful blend of masculine structure and feminine ease. “I love men’s watches, their weight, their hardware,” Beckham said. “I wanted to create something timeless and elevated that had a real ease and effortless elegance to it.”
And then, in 2025, came Cannes. Austin Butler walked the red carpet wearing a Chronomat, a final, effortless punctuation mark: Breitling isn’t a brand trying to be part of the fashion conversation, it has always been part of the discourse.
With the new Lady Premier, Breitling takes inspiration from its 1940s philosophy: unscripted elegance. The collection reflects the spirit of the modern woman—effortless, charming, and confidently herself. Influenced by Beatrice Breitling’s elegant sophistication, the Lady Premier collection brings that spirit into the present moment.
From Geneva to Paris, Breitling’s dialog with fashion has never been fleeting. It is a thread woven through decades: always evolving, always relevant, always unmistakably Breitling.
Discover the full collection of Women's Watches.
Illustrated by Saray Luis Martín Molina, whose work reinterprets the visual language of vintage Breitling advertising through a contemporary lens.