Hello, And welcome back to About Time, the weekly watches newsletter from Esquire.
You know the one thing that can unite a teenage Olympic skateboarder, people queuing through the night for a £270 plastic Snoopy accessory, and others praying for the announcement of something made of gold that costs more than average annual salary? We think you do. All three are subjects of this week’s newsletter. Thank you for reading it.
About Time is off on its Easter holidays next week. So we’ll see you again at 8am, Sunday 14 April.
Until then! |
Sky Brown jump-starts the Olympic clock |
Sky Plus: Brown and her Tag Heuer Aquaracer Professional 200 Solargraph |
On Tuesday morning I put on a lifejacket and climbed on board a barge on the River Thames to watch Sky Brown, the British-Japanese surfer and skateboarder, race up and down a ramp bookended by a pair of red London buses, in a feat that was billed as ‘London’s first-ever floating half-pipe’.
Brown won bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, aged 13 years and 28 days, making her Team GB’s youngest-ever Olympic medallist. With great success comes great sponsorship opportunity and in 2022 she was announced as an ambassador for the luxury Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer. Brown joined a line-up that includes athlete Fred Kerley, actor-driver Patrick Dempsey and Hollywood’s Ryan Gosling.
At this summer’s Paris Olympics she will again represent Team GB in skating – though not her other passion, surfing, having narrowly failed to qualify in the latter category earlier this month. (That would have made her the first Briton in more than 50 years to compete in two different sports simultaneously at the same summer Olympics.) It's hard to argue with Brown as a choice of brand ambassador.
While nobody really knows whether George Clooney wakes up Amal with a Nespresso in the mornings (perhaps she prefers tea?), sports stars wearing watches while they do sport is always good for business.
You can't really question a watchmaker's claims of excellent impact resistance when the evidence is strapped to someone's wrist on Centre Court whacking a tennis ball about. Plus, Brown is cool, young, famous, multicultural, and clearly having a great time. Also: skateboarding! Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t like skateboarding? And so it proved on Tuesday. Commuters waved. Tourists gawped. Schoolkids shouted. All while a drone buzzed around Brown, recording every trick – including her favourite ‘Japan Air’, grabbing the underside of the board with one hand, mid-flight – for a new Tag Heuer campaign. Afterwards I grabbed her for some air time 🤪 of my own. |
Air-Queen: “I like wearing fancy watches!” |
ABOUT TIME: How was that? Sky Brown: I’m so honoured to be here. Having that [Tower Bridge] as a background and being on this perfect ramp. It’s so iconic.
You’re Tag Heuer’s youngest brand ambassador. What are the perks like?
It’s super-fun. I always want to get one more run, or one more wave. But having a watch reminds me [not to be late]. ‘Okay! It’s time to go now!’ And being part of an amazing team and an amazing crew, I’m so thankful.
When I told my wife I was coming to this event this morning, she said: ‘Isn’t she too young to be into watches?’ I like wearing fancy watches!
Is it okay to skateboard wearing a Swiss watch? I barely even feel it! And this is, like, my favourite colour [teal, officially ‘polar blue’].
How do you think you’ve developed since Tokyo 2020? My skateboarding has become stronger. I’ve learned some new tricks. I think I’ve grown quite a lot. And not just in height. How are you feeling about Paris?
I don’t feel pressure, honestly. Having done it in Tokyo already, it makes me want to show my new tricks even more. It’s just exciting for me. It’s really not about medals. It’s about the show you put on for everyone! The tricks, you know? I always like to show the beautiful part of skateboarding. Tokyo was a really good show. But Paris will be even better. Sorry you didn't qualify for the surfing. Was that really gutting?
A little bit! That was a little bit of a bummer because I came super-close, you know? One spot away from qualifying for both. But I know I’ve got LA ahead [the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games]. So, I’m going to aim for that. And get two gold medals for Team GB!
How do you fit all the training in around school?
This is a lifestyle, skating and surfing. So, it’s super-easy to put it into your daily routine and mix it with school. I try and wake up early, at around 5am-ish and be the first one in the water. Waking up in the morning and going skating… honestly, it’s pretty easy.
Have you met any of the other Tag Heuer ambassadors? I haven’t yet. The team is really incredible, though. I can’t believe I’m part of it.
Not Ryan Gosling? No! Not yet! [Laughs] Ken!
An ambassador’s job is to get people excited about the brand. You wear an Aquaracer, and wore colourful Formula 1 chronographs before that. What comments do you get?
All of my friends are always jealous. Being able to wear this one in the ocean [water resistant to 200m] is really helpful. I definitely get some jealous friends. Skating or surfing? It’s like ramen and ice cream. When you have too much ramen, you want some ice cream. |
Everything you can expect on 10 April. Possibly |
Well I Wonder: the Rolex 'stand' in Geneva |
The biggest event in the watch calendar is heaving onto the horizon. Watches & Wonders, held every April in Geneva, is essentially a very posh trade show, where dozens of the biggest brands announce their new watches for the year. Fairly or not, there is one big brand that always gets the lion’s share of the attention. That brand is Rolex.
Famously FIS-level secretive, the fact that a company that size can keep under its hat (crown?) what it plans to release each year is almost as impressive as the launches themselves. It is always a surprise, even if the surprise is something as apparently trolling as The Great Case Size Scandal of 2020, when its big announcement was an increase of the Submariner by 1mm, something that short-circuited the internet. But then in 2023 Rolex seemed to go completely bananas (by Swiss/ Rolex standards, you understand, it's all relative), launching titanium versions of watches (Yacht-Master), watches with dials featuring balloons, jigsaw puzzle pieces and emojis (Oyster Perpetual; Day-Date) and a whole new line (the 1908, replacing its Cellini dress watches).
What might they have in store this year? I called around some experts and asked them what they’d like to see Rolex announce. And then what they thought Rolex would actually announce. |
Resistance is futile: a 2012 advert for 'The Milgauss' |
Oliver Müller, watch industry analyst/ strategist
“The Milgauss will be relaunched either this year or next year. I would expect them to do that for many reasons. The first reason being they will probably improve the resistance to magnetic fields to compete with Omega on the Master Chronometer with its 15,000 gaus. [Omega’s Globemaster Master Chronometer, released in 2015, was certified to have the ability to resist magnetic fields so strong you could wear it in an MRI machine. What's that? You can’t lift your arm to tell the time in an MRI machine? You’re missing the point]. It has no practical consequence. But just saying ‘I can do as good, or even better, than my competitor’, that would be one thing. The next one which is logical would be the new 1908 line which will they probably extend again – with either a GMT or a moonphase. And because they used it on the Yacht-Master would expect them to deploy titanium – I’m just not sure if they would do it only on the Submariner or only on the Explorer, but I would expect there to be one or two. And probably knowing my good friend [he means Jean-Frederic Dufour, CEO Rolex Group] he will provoke again this year with some funny things like he did last time with the puzzle or the balloons. So, I expect him to animate one of the lines to create a buzz. He’s very smart. He creates the buzz and people are even more crazy about Rolex afterwards.”
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The specials: the two-tone Explorer. Could a full gold version be on the way? |
Tony Traina, editor, Hodinkee
“They gave us a two-tone Explorer 36 a couple of years ago, but if they gave us a full gold, that’d be crazy. I doubt it’ll ever happen, but you never know. They did the 1908 last year, which was a bit predictable, as far as dress watches are concerned. I’d like to see if they could develop that. When they introduced it they said it was a new collection. So, I don’t know if that means complications, different sizes, different metals. The 'puzzle dial' was impressive, actually, from a craftsmanship perspective. I’d like to see if they’d expand on the use of enamel, that would be awesome. If they moved upmarket with that playful colour stuff and put it in a Day-Date – maybe it’s in the form of enamelling, or maybe bringing back the true lacquered [1970s] Stella dials that those OPs [Oyster Perpetuals] were playing off. So, we get real, lacquered Stella dials in a Day-Date. But we’ll see!”
Barbara Palumbo, aka @whatsonherwrist
“Seeing the brightly coloured bubbles on the dial of last year's steel Oyster Perpetual release brought such a smile to my face. It showed me that Rolex could have a little fun. But I don't believe they'll do that again in 2024 – my guess is they will wait another year or two. I think they may be reading the ‘80s/90s throwback’ room and will release one or more watches that are two-toned – yellow gold and steel. Last year's two-toned GMT-Master II release may have been a precursor. I feel they may surprise us by introducing two-tone in collections that wouldn’t normally be so daring.”
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Rolex 1908: "I would expect they'd do more" |
Eric Wind, owner, Wind Vintage
“I’d love to see some of the 1950s-style watches bought back. Whether it’s the Explorer or the Milgauss with a honeycomb dial. And I’d love to see the Explorer II go back to 39mm, like the originals from the 1970s with the orange [GMT] hand. The [current] 42mm size is just too big. They’ve done a lot with the Daytona recently, including the ‘Le Mans’ with the black dial [announced last summer], but I wonder if they wouldn’t consider doing something with a white dial variation, which would be cool, like the original watch Paul Newman wore. They don’t have 34mm watches anymore. That’s such a nice size for a lot of people, whether male or female or anywhere in between. I would love to see them have that as a size again. In terms of what I think will be done, I would expect they’d do more with the 1908, which replaced the Cellini. They had a really nice moonphase Cellini which came out some years back. So, a more complicated 1908 seems like something they should do. They’ve been toying a lot with enamel dials so I would expect them to do more with that. White gold models have been pretty hard for them to sell, other than the ‘Le Mans’ Daytona. The GMT sells for almost a $10,000 discount on the secondary market. So, I don’t know what they’ll have to do to make the white golds more interesting to people. Probably some more interesting colours, whether it’s for the Submariner or the GMT. The general strategy of Rolex over the past five years has been to push more and more people into precious metals. They had been very successful with that, but the market has softened over the last year. So, they’re going to have to continue to do innovative and interesting dials and bezels."
Brian Duffy, CEO, Watches of Switzerland Group
“Nobody knows. It’s amazing to me how they manage to keep so much secrecy in their organisation and somehow manage to surprise us every time. Every year all speculation tends to be pretty much 100 per cent inaccurate. I hope they don’t do a lot. We have extensive lists of a lot of people waiting patiently, for a long time, for product. The less they do in the way of introductions [ie: new models], the more they’ll be able to help us make customers happy that have ordered new products last year, or the year before, or the year before that, and still haven’t got them. The list for Datejusts and GMTs and Submariners just continues to get longer. It’s huge demand-versus-supply. There’s nothing that they’ve introduced for as long as I’ve been involved that doesn’t result in frenzied interest. But I’m going to contradict myself. When you do see what they release, it’s fantastic. And I look forward to being thrilled again this year.”
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Coke is it? The experts demand it |
Rikki [it’s just ‘Rikki’], editor, Scottish Watches
“I hope they continue to shock and they don’t just revert to moving the Photoshop slider on the bezel [ie: adding or subtracting a couple of millimetres here or there]. I think we’ll see titanium spreading across the range, into the Submariner, the Deepsea, the Sea-Dweller, to take away some of the heft but still having massive amounts of water resistance, which everybody loves. Last year the bubbles and the puzzles were completely out of leftfield, and it would be good to see more of that. What do I think Rolex will actually do? Probably drop the precious metals down to steel as they have done historically. Maybe moving the clear caseback from selected Daytonas to other Daytonas because the movement is half-decent looking. The thing I’ve noticed from previous watch fairs is there does seem to be a tick-tock between [sibling company] Tudor and Rolex. One year Tudor would go ‘Oh, there we go, there’s a GMT with a Pepsi bezel’ and nothing would happen at Rolex. Next year Rolex would do something cool. I do think this will be the year of the Coke [ie: bringing back the red-and-black GMT-Master II] – they’ll decide to roll out the black and red bezel and kick things up a gear.”
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Patently obvious: is this Rolex's Sky-Dweller Perpetual Calendar? |
Andrew Morgan, AMW, luxury watch consultants
“If I were to say what would I like them to do, it would probably be the Coke. That’s what everyone has been asking for. I think what will be challenging is the confusion they’ve got themselves into with some of the anniversaries. The Submariner they say [came out in] ’53, but they didn’t release an anniversary watch for it last year. So some of the predictions are that they might release an anniversary model this year. Which aligns with when experts generally believe the Submariner really came out, which was ’54. They might have started thinking about it in ’53 but it was announced at Baselworld [watch fair] in ’54. And the Coke – people also believe that it was '54 that [the original GMT-Master] was announced, but Rolex counts that as '55, So an anniversary Submariner and an anniversary GMT-Master both seem to be on the cards at some point. But if it’s the thing we’re expecting it’s probably the thing they won’t do. Or if they do, they’ll be in precious metals that nobody can afford. I’d also quite like to see a moonphase version of the 1908. I was surprised last year that the Yacht-Master was the watch that came in titanium, and not the Sea-Dweller – I wonder if a Sea-Dweller in titanium might appear this year? The Yacht-Master II is probably one of the most hated watches in the Rolex line-up. It’s due an update. I’d be interested to see what would look like. It’s one of the most complicated watches they make, and it’s been sat there doing nothing. Rolex also has a whole bunch of different patents. They put them forward to stop anyone else [making similar watches], if nothing else. One that interested me was a perpetual calendar system that has been massively simplified. It’s a much more robust and simplified version compared to what is typically quite a delicate mechanism. So, I’d be interested to see if they’re going to do a Sky-Dweller Perpetual Calendar. That would be very cool. The patent was quite recent, actually [June 2023]. And it shows a lot of detailed drawings that demonstrate how the mechanism works. If I were Rolex, I would be thinking that I wouldn't want to show how it works... until the product is ready to go.”
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Last year's emoji Day-Date puzzle watch: red meat for Instagrammers |
Rob Coder, editor, WatchPro
“Rolex has been increasing its production of the steel professional watches [eg: Daytona, Submariner, GMT-Master, Explorer II] that have had the longest waiting lists over the past year, so I would expect that strategic direction to close the gap between demand and supply to continue. This suggests 2024 will be about peak manufacturing, without compromising Rolex’s quality control standards, rather than a significant change to the product line. There will be some red meat for the Instagrammers, as the business delivered with its emoji Day-Date last year, but every novelty must be judged for its impact on peak productivity. I would manage my expectations to a slew of line extensions across the GMT-Master family, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary. Or could there be a rabbit in Rolex’s hat and a GMT-Master III with some subtle advances in design and engineering?”
Guido Mondani, publisher/ author, Mondani Books
“I think they will present a new Submariner, with innovative features. I also think they should release Rolexes with transparent casebacks.” Ex-Rolex employee
“Everyone thinks Rolex makes tiny changes to their existing watches each year. That’s true. But it hides the insane amount of market research they do. Of all the watch companies I’ve worked for, there’s nothing that even comes close to it. If they release a watch in titanium, that’s because that is where the market is heading. If they do one with a joyful, colourful dial, same thing. No other luxury brand has the market share they now have – 30 per cent at retail – on a mono-product brand. That is unseen anywhere else. Not Louis Vuitton, not Gucci. No one else can pretend to capture 30 per cent of the market on their own. Like everyone, I have no ideas. But whatever it is, that is where the market is going.”
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Fire away, fire away: the 2023 Yacht-Master, in titanium |
Justin Hast, writer/presenter/consultant
“I love the Milgauss and I’ve always wanted to wear one but I just don’t like the bracelet. The issue I’ve had is the polished centre-link – this is how detailed my thought process has been! I love the GV crystal [green-tinted sapphire crystal] and I love the lightning bolt second hand. Because, to me, it’s so un-Rolex. But I hate the fact that the centre link is polished. So, I would love, this year, to see a new Milgauss with a brushed Oyster bracelet, new crown guards and a 40mm case – and a new movement. In the industry we’ve seen a real push towards anti-magnetism. So I’d love to see some innovation there. And at an accessible price point. That would be wicked.”
I also asked the Reddit forum r/rolex what they’d like to see. Here are some of the more publishable responses.
“Tiffany turquoise Sky-Dweller” - u/CHP2277 “Green dial Daytona” -u/Maleficent-Water5698
“Travis Scott x Sub” -u/rowthecow
“Here is a crazy thought. How about just get stock to dealers with what’s in the catalogue right now’ -u/SupectN0451 “Brand new line. Slight variations are dull” -u/MerlynAFC “Coke” -u/yld2Rob “Pepsi with a white dial” -u/interianism “I would just like for them to sell me a freakin watch 🤣” -u/Mammon84 |
In the queue with the MoonSwatch megafans |
The beagle has landed: the Snoopy MoonSwatch arrived on Tuesday |
It is 8.10 in the morning, and they’ve been here for hours.
The queue is three-deep and snakes the length of one of Covent Garden’s historic streets. The young, fashionably dressed crowd wait anxiously in line, or sit chatting on the pavement – stretching and doing each other’s make-up. Excitement is in the air.
Meanwhile, across the street from the open audition at Pineapple Dance Studios, there is another queue. Older, less obviously up on the latest sportswear trends and, frankly, about 95 per cent more male, it is the line for the latest watch release from Omega x Swatch,
Two years to the day after the two brands unveiled their record-breaking joint-venture – a plastic Bioceramic version of Omega’s classic Speedmaster that has now been produced in 22 iterations, inspired six Blancpain versions and tripled Swatch’s turnover from CHF 214 million [£188m] to CHF 660 million [£585m] – a new MoonSwatch was in town.
The all-white Mission To The Moonphase was notable for a couple of reasons. First, it was the only Swatch chronograph in its 41-year history to feature a moonphase, the function that shows different phases of the moon through a small hole on the dial. Second, it had Snoopy on the dial.
The rise in cartoon – I’m sorry, character – watches over the last few years has been quite something. No longer the preserve of Year 3 playgrounds, serious horology-heads may now take their pick from a Franck Muller x Bamford Watch Department model with Popeye on the dial, a lime green Oris featuring Kermit the Frog popping up in the date window once a month or a Tag Heuer smartwatch with Mario racing along in his Kart (“It’s Mario Time!”) – and not be thrown out of Watch Club.
More importantly, Snoopy has a special place in watch lore. The Peanuts’ beagle has been Nasa’s mascot since the 1960s. He has been used in an internal safety campaign and to illustrate astronauts’ instruction books. A lunar lander was named for him, so was a crater on the moon.
There exists such a thing as the Silver Snoopy Award, considered the American space agency’s highest honour. According to Nasa a ‘Silver Snoopy Award is given personally by Nasa astronauts to Nasa employees and contractors for outstanding achievements related to human flight safety or mission success’.
Some 15,000 Silver Snoopys have been proudly pinned onto Nasa's most-deserving employees since 1968.
Omega famously kitted out astronauts including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with Speedmaster Professional chronographs, and various special editions of the ‘Moonwatch’ have featured Snoopy on their dials, triggering long waiting lists for Omega-heads and commanding top dollar on resale. |
NASA-approved: Omega's 2020 Silver Snoopy Award 50th Anniversary watch |
The initial Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch launch in March 2022 was a big one. Unavailable online and purposefully limited to physical Swatch shops – and only certain ones around the world at that – the obvious intention was to get eyes back on a brand that had perhaps lost a little of its shine. It worked.
In some locations riot police were dispatched and shops were forced to shut. Some people suggested Swatch hadn’t thought the idea through properly. Others pointed out it wasn’t a bad way to get a load of free publicity. “It was crazy,” Nick Hayek Jr, CEO of the Swatch Group, owners of both Swatch and Omega, recalled. “We clearly communicated from the beginning: it’s not a limited edition.”
But no one was listening to that. Resale prices on StockX got completely out of hand, while a suitcase containing 11 models of the special edtitions – they were still plastic watches! – sold at Sotheby’s in February for CHF 534,670 (£467,745), with the money going to an Omega-backed charity.
After 28 versions in 24 months, it was perhaps understandable that a certain ennui has set in around the whole MoonSwatch caper. Debate has swung back and forth over whether the exercise has been good or bad for ‘the hobby’ of watches. If the Comments section of Swatch’s Instagram can sometimes make for painful reading on the subject, Mr Heyek can probably live with that. The idea was indisputably the single greatest watchworld marketing event this decade, something that will surely be taught in business schools for years to come. A Snoopy version seemed like a good bet to check if there was still fuel left in the rocket. And Swatch went for it – teasing Snoopy cartoons on its social media back in January and taking out whimsical full-page ads in the broadsheet press featuring paw prints on the moon’s surface.
Some hardcore Omega fans, of which there are many, suggested this was an IP raid too far – Snoopy might be an amusing cartoon dog but he wasn’t a joke. His likeness was used to recognise the very bravest men and women within an organisation that Omega had deep and profound roots with.
But by and large the comments on Swatch’s IG turned from 😡 to 😀. Snoopy was one the one to get behind. The flippers certainly thought so. The day it was announced, and before anyone outside a select few inside Swatch had actually seen one, the £270 watch was listed on eBay for £5,000.
So I decided to see how easy it would be to get one on launch day. Would the riot police still be standing by? Or had things died down to the point that you could stroll into a Swatch store and pick one up? I live in London, and there were three Swatch shops due to stock the Mission To The Moonphase – Oxford Street, Carnaby Street and Covent Garden. It launched at 10am on Tuesday 26th. |
Oxford Street, 25/3/2024, 4.04 pm |
At 4pm on Monday I went on a recce. Oxford Street seemed to be the place to start, but where previous launches had had seen evidence of fold-up chairs, rolled-up sleeping bags and wrapped-up punters preparing for a night queuing ahead of the next morning's opening, the pavement outside was deserted. So, I went in and asked. Were they getting the Snoopy in tomorrow? “Maybe!” said the assistant, brightly. It’s just that I was expecting queues…
“Yeah, we thought there might be. But they’re not letting anyone stay outside the store. They are people outside other stores, though.” Fifteen minutes away on Carnaby Street, though, there wasn’t any evidence of it. |
Carnaby Street, 25/3/2024, 4.11 pm |
I asked again. I was expecting queues! “I think we all were,” said the assistant, a bit glumly. “But it doesn’t look like it.” At Covent Garden things looked more hopeful – one guy on a fold-down chair, with two more waiting.
How long had the man at the front been there? “Two days,” he said. What?
“I’ve been first at every launch,” he said, referring to the various MoonSwatch and Blancpain releases that had come before. And what time would be recommended I get down here tomorrow morning, to be in with a shout? Eight o’clock?
“Eight o’clock! You ain’t gonna get a watch at eight o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Not gonna happen. Not in a million years.” Based on his experience, he said the queue would really start to pick up once work had finished and get “heavy” around midnight.
“I wouldn’t come later than 5 o’clock." |
Covent Garden, 25/3/2024, 4.35 pm |
My new friend was wearing a Hublot-branded jacket, so I asked if he was a watch fan. They answer turned out to be yes and no. A fortnight ago he’d been first through the door at the Omega boutique in Geneva and picked up the extremely tasty new white-dialled (real) Speedmaster, the day it came out. But he’d bought it to flip it.
“Bought it in Swiss money, and got the tax back at the airport,” he said. “So, it cost me 6/7 rather than 7/7 [ie: £6,700 not £7,700].” As for MoonSwatches, he’d given his collection to his son. Tomorrow’s Snoopy one, though, was already sold. “Done deal,” he said. “£1,270.” Well, I guess that was worth his time. “It’s not!” he spluttered. “It’s three days.” He thought about it. “Really, I should keep this. This is a keeper, really. ‘Cos the Snoopy – and there’s only one. The others were range of watches. This is one watch.”
He said he’d seen the FedEx man drop off earlier and claimed he’d given him the indication, via some complicated finger gestures, that he’d got 150 watches with him – the stock for the store.
I wasn’t sure how likely it was the FedEx man would know the precise contents of his packages, or how much the Hublot jacket man knew about anything, really. So I said I might see him later. “Wrap up,” he said. “It’s fucking freezing!” |
Oxford Street, 25/3/24, 11.52 pm |
I did the same circuit again just before midnight. By now there was a small queue down the side of the Oxford Street store – about 35 people. The guy at the front said they had been allowed to queue from 9pm. He was in good spirits and wearing last year’s Swatch x Omega Mission To Moonshine Gold edition. He was a fan, not a flipper. “One hundred percent I’m going to keep it,” he said. Over at Carnaby Street it was hard to make out if there was a queue or not – or just a group of half-a-dozen guys, standing around.
A security man was on hand, too. “What was crazy was Oxford Street last year,” he said. “Where we had to use barriers to keep people in line. And we set a cut-off point [after which we knew we’d have run out of stock]. They weren’t happy. You have to let people know as soon as you get that information. People have got things to do. “This one is more low-key.” He told me I was seventh in the queue and offered to keep my place for me. I made my excuses and left. Carnaby Street was filling up. Hublot jacket-man was asleep in his fold-up chair, so I got talking to a young couple from Brixton. (It was indeed getting ‘fucking freezing’, and as we spoke they reached into their overnight bag, ripped opened a multipack of Christmas socks and used them as gloves.)
On the question of whether the MoonSwatch hype had cooled, they had an interesting take. “I think a lot of people are poor right now and no one realises it,” one of them said. “The economy’s absolutely fucked. People used to spend their money of frivolous things. Now they just can’t.”
Whether you consider a Snoopy watch – or any watch – to be frivolous is up for debate. Either way, these guys were keeping theirs. (They were wearing matching Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Ocean of Storms watches.) “Why would you want to sell it?” |
Covent Garden, 26/3/2024, 9.51 am |
Launch day came, and at 8am the queue at Oxford Street was so long it had to be broken into three. I counted roughly 150 people, which if the stock estimate was right, meant that even the stragglers rocking up at that point might be in with a shout.
Meanwhile, the internet was telling me that Dubai’s only Swatch shop stocking the Snoopy watch, at the Mall of Emirates, had opened four hours early because of concerns of the crowd being crushed. There had been, it said, ‘dogfights’.
At Carnaby Street someone I took to be the manager came out of the store before it opened and told the back end of the queue they were too late – although all was not lost, they’d be restocking on Friday. Meanwhile, Covent Garden was really a scene. A line snaking around and doubling back on itself, with passers-by stopping to ask security what the fuss was about. “A watch?” they boggled. At 9.50 people were still joining the queue, which was now massive. Did the guy right at the back feel optimistic?
“No, but you’ve got to be in it,” he said, nonsensically. |
Covent Garden, 26/3/2024, 10.03 am. Mission accomplished for one happy punter |
Security gave a two-minute warning and at 10am sharp the first Omega x Swatch Mission To The Moonphase Snoopy watch in London was sold to the man in the Hublot jacket. Someone in the Swatch store took his photo. Was it worth it? “Nah,” he joked. “Load of old rubbish!” He was off to bed. |
Tudor Black Bay Chrono 'Pink' |
On Thursday Tudor surprise-released a new iteration of its 41mm Black Bay chronograph. It's pink! And an apparent nod to two Tudor ambassadors, David Beckham, whose Inter Miami football club is kitted out in the same colour, and Taiwanese musician Jay Chou, who (it says here) loves a bit of pink. In an usual bit of marketing Tudor announced that the watch was 'not for everyone'. Since only a small number will ever be produced, perhaps that was a polite way of managing expectations. Because this pink is hot pink. £5,675; tudor.com
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THE MYSTERY OF CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S FRANKENWATCH |
It's either a stunning piece of Soviet history, or a wry allegory for scientific hubris.
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