There are watches recognized at a glance, and others, rarer, identified at the fingertips even before being seen. That is the wager Hublot makes with the new Big Bang Original Soft Touch, unveiled in Geneva on September 1, 2026: shifting the ground of watchmaking recognition from the visual to the tactile, by dressing the Manufacture’s icon in an unprecedented textured rubber.
A Texture That Is Not a Coating, But a Construction
The nuance is significant, and Hublot insists on it: this particular grain covering the case, bezel, dial and strap is neither a varnish nor a surface treatment applied afterward, but a material conceived as such. The exclusive rubber compound is produced by overmolding, with tooling specially developed to integrate the texture directly into the heart of manufacturing. Its microscopic structure, made of thousands of extremely fine micro-elements, gives an unusual softness to the touch for a material known above all for its robustness. The promise fits in one sentence: the texture is part of the construction, not the finishing.
All Black and All Red, Two Color Codes Reinterpreted Through Touch
Hublot is not reinventing its palette; it is elevating its status. Introduced in 2006, the All Black concept had turned the absence of color into a radical signature of the Art of Fusion; twenty years later, the Soft Touch version keeps this deep black — titanium case, DLC-coated pushers — but adds a dimension the eye alone can no longer grasp. The All Red variation, for its part, extends the story of the Red Ceramic unveiled in 2018, the first high-tech ceramic to display such an intense color: titanium, cast in Soft Touch rubber, turns this iconic hue into sensation as much as image. In both cases, the color remains identical; it is the way of perceiving it that changes.
A Unico Movement With Nothing Left to Prove
Beneath this new skin, the Big Bang Original Soft Touch retains what has built the line’s technical reputation since 2005: the Unico chronograph caliber, developed and manufactured in-house, which brings together five patented innovations — column wheel, double clutch, layered construction, optimized gear train and a skeletonized tungsten oscillating weight cut in the shape of an H — for a 72-hour power reserve. Housed in a 43mm case, the watch pairs this proven architecture with a carbon-motif dial, raised counters and tone-on-tone chapter rings, in an interplay of layers that gives the whole its depth. The strap, fitted with the One Click quick-change system, and the case itself, whose texture echoes the watch’s Soft Touch, extend this sensory coherence down to the smallest detail of presentation.
Assembled at the Manufacture in Nyon and covered by a warranty extending up to ten years, the Big Bang Original Soft Touch raises a question that goes beyond Hublot alone: in a watchmaking world where visual identity has largely exhausted itself through already-written codes, could touch become the next language of recognition?
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