Hublot and Jeff Koons turn the Balloon Dog into the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, a limited-edition luxury watch where contemporary art meets watchmaking: three editions, 200 pieces each, and a case that looks as if someone gave it one very persuasive breath.

A balloon animal lasts about as long as a child’s attention. It squeaks, it bobs, something sharp finds it, and the afternoon moves on. Jeff Koons spent the better part of the 1990s making sure one of them never would. His Balloon Dog, worked on between 1994 and 2000 as part of the Celebration series, took the party entertainer’s twist of rubber and fixed it in mirror-finished perfection. What was fragile became monumental. A passing gesture became permanent.

Hublot has now asked what happens when that logic is pointed at a watch. The answer, unveiled in New York on 16 September, is the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons. The Classic Fusion, introduced in 2008, has always been the sleek and relatively flat member of the family, so the task was close to a contradiction: make a slim watch look pumped full of air. Koons is clear that this took more than laying an artwork over an existing case. The whole architecture had to be rethought through the language of inflatables, so that every component appears to have been shaped by pressure.

There is a nice irony in the choice of model. Hublot describes the Classic Fusion as the collection that balances boldness and restraint, and here the restraint has been asked, politely, to step aside. The control has not. Hublot describes Koons’s practice as absolute command of form, scale and finish, which is just what a watch pretending to be a balloon requires. A balloon that is slightly off looks like a mistake. A balloon that is exactly right looks like Koons.

The result is a watch with no sharp opinions about edges. The sapphire crystal is domed. So are the titanium screw heads. The dial is puffed up, the case swells, and the padded metallic leather strap meets the case through softened attachment points, so nothing pokes where a balloon would not. At 42mm wide and 11mm thick, it is not a shy object, but the whole design is committed to one idea: that it might squeak if you pressed it.

The jokes are in the details, and Hublot has clearly enjoyed them. The crown is shaped like a balloon’s inflation valve, in aluminium and rubber. At 10:30 sits a small flexible tail, which turns out to be a dog’s tail. The seconds hand ends in a tiny Balloon Dog as its counterweight, the hands and indexes are inflated and filled with Super-LumiNova, and Koons’s signature sits on the dial at six o’clock like a sculptor’s mark on the base of a plinth.

Then there is colour, which is where a Koons piece lives or dies. The watch comes in three editions. One is mirror-polished stainless steel, the closest a wrist can get to the reflective skin of the sculptures. The other two are red and blue anodised aluminium, a metal Hublot picked because it holds the vivid, saturated tones associated with Koons’s work. Straps and rubber elements are matched to each case. Even the box joins in: an inflated dog in a chrome finish, colour-matched to the watch it holds, with rubber-effect paint that plays along with the rest.

It would be easy to assume all this softness came easily. Hublot’s CEO, Julien Tornare, says the opposite. What looks effortless and playful, he argues, is a serious exercise in engineering, with components milled on five-axis CNC machines into their puffed shapes and then finished by hand. Inside is a self-winding movement made and assembled at the Manufacture in Nyon, with a custom oscillating weight whose rounded form echoes the case. The technical effort, in other words, is spent on making things look soft.

The pairing makes more sense the longer you look at it. Hublot built its name in 1980 by putting a gold case on a rubber strap, which at the time was something of a prank on the luxury watch world. Koons has made a career of taking everyday objects, scaling them up and polishing them until they look inevitable. Both are in the business of making the serious look playful, and playful look expensive. Whether this particular watch flatters a wrist as well as it flatters a press image is something only a fitting room can settle, and we have not been in one yet.

Each edition is limited to 200 pieces, available at selected Hublot points of sale and shown in selected galleries, which fits the idea of a watch that sits halfway between an accessory and an artwork. The price is CHF 20,800, or €24,600, across all three.

Koons made a balloon that outlasts the party. Hublot has now made it keep an eye on the clock.

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