Last year’s Dennison x Collectability collaboration landed at a sweet spot rarely found in modern watchmaking: legitimate collector credibility at an impulse-buy price. The partnership between Collectability founder John Reardon and the revived British watchmaker sold enthusiasts on a simple proposition: good design, thoughtful provenance, and a sub-$1,000 price tag. Reardon—a former sales and marketing executive at Patek Philippe and senior watch specialist at Christie’s before founding the influential collector platform Collectability—brought a connoisseur’s eye to a watch that felt far more expensive than it was.
Now, the partnership is back with a second act, and it arrives at precisely the right moment. The new Dennison x Collectability 2026 Edition Oblique Collection retails for $790 and retains the distinctive Dennison silhouette. However, this isn’t a simple reissue. The new watches push the concept in a more sculptural direction: the familiar case architecture has been reimagined with an asymmetrical motif that creates an entirely new dial geometry, resulting in a watch that feels more like a piece of wrist-borne design than a traditional dress watch. Reardon developed the concept alongside legendary Swiss designer Emmanuel Gueit, whose résumé includes one of the most important luxury-sports watches ever made: the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore.
The collection consists of two sub-lines, Enigma and Vector. The former will be familiar to fans of 2025’s Dennison X Collectability mashup, with similar colorways but with a dramatic twist on the dial. Within the cushion case—available in steel or gold-tone PVD—an asymmetric crystal gives way to a rhomboid dial in deep blue contained within a larger rhomboid shape in lighter turquoise blue, complemented with a spade handset in a case-matching color. The Vector line, on the other hand, features the same asymmetric crystal atop either a silver or gold-tone dial with radiating “vector” lines that lend it a playful midcentury character.
The Dennison x Collectability Oblique collection is the perfect watch for this current moment. For the better part of a decade, the enthusiast market was consumed by steel sports watches. Divers, chronographs, and integrated-bracelet models ruled collecting discourse. Recently, however, a different set of priorities has emerged. Collectors have begun gravitating toward shaped watches, elegant dress pieces, and watches distinguished not by complicated mechanics but by compelling design. The resurgence of interest in pieces such as the Cartier Tank, vintage Golden Ellipse references, precious-metal Piagets, and a new generation of unusual geometric cases reflects a broader desire for individuality in a market that has become increasingly homogeneous.
