Winter Sports Meet Luxury in Hublot Big Bang MECA-10 Aspen One Edition

Among Swiss luxury watch brands, very few have established relationships with as wide a range of sports, and as diverse a collection of star athletes, as Hublot — from serving as official timing partner of the FIFA World Cup, to partnering with brand ambassadors like Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt and hockey star Alex Ovechkin, to producing a watch specially engineered to score a round of golf. On the other end of its partnership spectrum, however, Hublot has also embraced various aspects of experiential luxury, with special editions created in collaboration with elite brands like Fuente cigars and Berluti leathers, as well as ultra-exclusive models specially targeted at luxe destinations like the Eden Rock Hotel in Saint Barth’s. All of these worlds come together in the recently launched Big Bang MECA-10 Aspen One, which made its debut at the inaugural Snow League Championships at Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, on March 8.

The watch is actually the third special edition created in partnership with Aspen One, the organization that essentially runs all of the winter sports and associated high-end hospitality in the world-famous ski town of Aspen, including the renowned Snowmass resort. Hublot entered into its arrangement with Aspen One, as “Official Timekeeper and Resort Partner” in 2019, and carries that pedigree into its new role as sponsor of the Snow League, the world’s first and only professional sports league devoted to snowboarding and free skiing.

The Snow League was founded by snowboarding legend and three-time Olympic gold-medalist Shaun White, who was on site in Aspen for the inaugural competition weekend. White and his fiancee, actress Nina Dobrev, joined the assembled crowd of fans, sponsor guests, athletes, and media for the festivities, culminating in a Champions Party at the Saint Regis Snow Lodge, where DJ Steve Angello of Swedish House Mafia spun tunes and the highest scorers of the men’s and women’s halfpipe competitions — Japan’s Yuto Totsuka and Korea’s Gaon Choi — were presented with Classic Fusion Racing Grey timepieces.

As alluded to above, the Aspen experience that Hublot pays tribute to with this model is a marriage of outdoorsy athleticism and high-end leisure that is practically unmatched anywhere else in the United States, and the brand pulled out all the stops on both ends for the launch event: lodging and late evening cocktails at the five-star Little Nell hotel, a day of skiing and boarding at Aspen Mountain, a Veuve Clicquot-sponsored lunch at the Cabin at Snowmass, an opulent dinner with a tasting of Hennessy Paradis cognac at the Saint-Regis. Shaun White was present at the dinner, proudly sporting the new Hublot Aspen One edition, which I also had the pleasure of seeing up close and handling in the metal (and ceramic).

The Big Bang MECA-10 Aspen One arrives at its distinctive “mountain DNA” aesthetic (the brand’s words) via a combination of elements. The 45mm case is made of microblasted black ceramic, measures 15.96mm thick and resists water pressure to 100 meters. Its bezel, with the six hallmark H-shaped screws characteristic of the Big Bang family, is forged from white ceramic for a high-contrast look meant to evoke the juxtaposition of snow-covered and rocky areas on alpine mountains. The bezel itself, in fact, has a very distinctive, soft “snowy” texture — very different from the characteristic smooth surfaces on ceramics — achieved through a combination of microblasting and polishing. 

On the skeletonized dial, you’ll find another, more discreet detail speaking to this watch’s connection to Aspen: the Bauhaus-style Aspen Leaf logo designed by Austrian-American graphic artist Herbert Bayer that represents the city of Aspen, at 12 o’clock. Join the club if you didn’t know Aspen had its own logo. Actually, another historical tidbit about the storied ski town finds its way onto the dial as well, namely its founding as a silver mining camp in the 1880s: this heritage inspired the use of high-shine titanium elements that draw the eye to the mechanism behind the clear sapphire dial — more on which below — and its wide sword handset. 

The “10” in MECA-10 refers to the movement’s most impressive technical talking point, its 240-hour power reserve, which simple math reveals is equivalent to 10 full days of energy before the watch needs another winding, The manually wound Caliber HUB1201 inside the watch — and very much in view, from the front and back, thanks to the clear dial as well as the sapphire caseback — made its high-profile debut in the very first Big Bang MECA-10 models in 2016 and has been used relatively sparingly since. As 2025 marks 20 years of the Big Bang, however, there are signs that Hublot might be installing the groundbreaking 10-day caliber in more watches from that flagship family in the future; recently, the brand dropped its first Big Bang MECA-10 in a smaller, 42mm case, indicating it’s reaching out beyond its core audience.

Caliber HUB1201 is built on three linear bridges attached to the mainplate and positions its balance wheel in the front of the movement for total visibility from the front. The watch’s 10 days’ worth of mechanical energy are stored in two mainspring barrels and prominently indicated in an unusual, digital-numerical display — in days rather than hours — driven by a “cremaillere” rack-and-pinion system. The system, one rarely seen in mechanical watches, employs a linear gear engaging a circular gear moving in a straight line, while two superimposed disks rotate in opposite directions, connected by a spiral spring in their center that serves as a differential. The result is a perfect synchronization of the power reserve display with the winding level of the barrel springs. Additionally, the MECA-10 movement features a regulating organ with a lubricant-free, paramagnetic silicon escape wheel.

Like most Hublot watches these days, the Aspen One comes with two interchangeable straps: one in white calf leather, with black rubber lining, echoing that “virgin snow” look of the bezel; the other in black-lined rubber, that isolates the snow-white bezel to give it more of a pop of contrast. Both complete the case’s and bezel’s alpine-mountain theme with a deployant buckle fusing black-plated titanium and white ceramic. Hublot has also designed the watch’s packaging with sustainability in mind, housing it in a bespoke wooden box with the Aspen One “leaf” logo, made from 98 percent “eco-friendly components.” Despite the watch’s clear connection to Aspen, it will be available at Hublot authorized dealer across the U.S., priced at $27,400.