PARIS — Looking to bounce back from the travails of the past month, Christian Dior is using the Baselworld show to introduce a new luxury watch collection.

Previous Dior watch designs have been associated with specific designers, like Victoire de Castellane, Hedi Slimane and John Galliano, who was recently fired from the company. But the new Dior VIII collection is linked to the historical codes of the brand itself.

"We wanted to create a collection that would become another iconic design for the brand," said Laurence Nicolas, president of Christian Dior watches and fine jewelry. "Just like the Bar jacket has been something that has inspired the house since 1946 and the emblematic Lady Dior handbag or the Dior J'Adore perfume are symbols for the house, we wanted to create a watch that had timelessness about it."

Implanting the brand's DNA started with the name. Eight is a fetish number in the brand's history and identity. The company's flagship jewelry store is at 8 Place Vendôme in Paris and its headquarters are in the elegant eighth arrondissement.

"Christian Dior was a very superstitious man," Mrs. Nicolas said. "He called his first collection Figure 8 to give it good luck and when you start to really look, the number eight shows up a lot in the house's history."

The name is not the only thing the collection takes from Dior's history. The look of the watch is inspired by Mr. Dior's lifelong love of architecture, his fascination with asymmetry and, of course, the world of haute couture dressing and pierce body jewelry.

Dior is pulling out all the stops at Baselworld, where it will introduce not just one or two, but 16 new watches simultaneously for the Dior VIII collection alone.

The collection is subdivided into lines that reflect the way the house does its fashion business — the watch equivalents of ready-to-wear, cocktail and haute couture.

The introductory day-wear Dior VIII watches come in eight different options, designed as refined and polished cousins to the slightly chunkier Dior Christal collection. The bracelets are fashioned from pyramid-shaped links in black ceramic, the dials are covered in black lacquer and the unidirectional rotating bezels subtly echo the look of the bracelet with an asymmetric pattern.

On the face of the watch, the plain hour indicators are offset by the Roman numeral VIII at the 8 o'clock point.

The watch is offered in two sizes, 33 millimeters and 38 millimeters, or 1.3 inches and 1.5 inches. In deference to rising demand, particularly in Asia, for automatic movements in smaller timepieces, both sizes come in quartz and automatic. Prices start at €3,500, or $4,885, for the 33-millimeter quartz movement and reach €6, 800 for versions with diamonds flesh tunnels on the bezel or dial.

"These watches are like the little black dress that you can wear for any occasion," Mrs. Nicolas said.

For the four 33-millimeter cocktail watches, priced at €30,000 to €45,000, the house accents the black backdrop with four different, high-impact colored bezels. The colors of the baguette-cut white diamonds, yellow citrines, gr

een tsavorites and pink sapphires are repeated on the rotor of the watch — visible through a display on the back — in Day-Glo lacquer-painted hues reminiscent of a technique used in Dior jewelry.

The four "haute couture" timepieces combine the brand's sartorial know-how with haute horlogerie. Called Grand Bal, the line picks up on a growing trend to show the oscillating weight of the watch on the dial. Limited to 18 pieces each, these watches and body jewelry, which start selling in November, take inspiration from iconic dresses and details of some of Dior's haute couture pieces. Thus the white gold rotor is sculpted in diamond and mother of pearl to resemble the lace of an evening gown or the silhouette of a ball gown. The movement was designed by the master watchmaker Frédéric Jouvenot and is called the Dior Inversé.

"Because each of the four oscillating weights is sculpted in a different style we had to recalculate and adjust the weight of the rotor so that it would function correctly for the timepiece," Mrs. Nicolas said.