Issue 203: Have Watches Gone Beyond Parody?
AP x Swatch? A cheesegrater watch? Steamy penguin caseback action? An essay on the challenging task of mocking an industry that has completely embraced the absurd.
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that, yes, published a podcast leading on Swatch’s mystery launch mere minutes before all the Royal/Pop stuff came out. So no, if you’ve listened, I no longer think it’ll be a Breguet collab - unless this has all been one brilliant hoax, but can you imagine how unhappy people would be to think they were getting AP x Swatch Royal Swoaks/Poptagons/Sistem 51202s and find it was really a plastic Classique after all? For what it’s worth, I think all the mock-ups are far too similar to an actual Royal Oak - they are going to have to change a few more details, if you ask me - but that’s what you get when you just slap it in AI portals. In my day, kids did their own photoshop, and you’d download it all on Napster before posting it to your wall…they don’t know they’re born, etc etc… where’s my cane and slippers? Wake me up when it’s lunchtime...
Listen to the podcast anyway, if you haven’t already - there’s some stuff that hasn’t gone out of date yet, from La Joux-Perret’s production increases to Swatch Group boardroom drama and my less than fawning take on Naoya Hida’s new chronograph.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Is this supposed to be funny?
When it gets to Wednesday afternoon and I still don’t know what this newsletter is going to be about, I start to get the jitters. There is still time, as I write this, for fate to provide eleventh-hour inspiration - maybe LVMH will buy a brand, or another young genius will emerge, hermit-like, from his atelier with a five-dimensional tourbillon. Failing that, one of my esteemed peers in the fourth estate might do me the courtesy of writing something daft, that I might disagree with it at length. Still time for that, too, but lately I’ve found that far too many writers seem to have their heads properly screwed on, or that I’ve read, and disagreed with, all the bad takes before.
So if you are reading this, you know that hasn’t happened. Or worst of all, it happened too late - many has been the Thursday evening when, 3,000 words down, I’ve flipped Instagram open to see with dismay the entire watch universe obsessing over an incredible launch or juicy breaking news.
I keep hardly any ‘break glass in case of emergency’ draft stories on hand, and the last few weeks have been too busy for me to research something meticulous, interview anyone extraordinary or travel anywhere diverting. My apologies.
I’m going to fall back on talking about The Fourth Wheel itself, at least to start with. I used to describe this newsletter as a publication that liked to gently mock, or tease, the watch industry, because for almost as long as I have been writing about watches, I have been aware that it is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and the most deathly serious environments in which to operate. Leaden earnestness, Jack Forster called it only a few days ago.
I know that a lot of you enjoy the sarcastic asides, the silliness, the bad puns and the dad jokes at least as much as any semblance of serious journalism. I am also acutely aware that they have dwindled drastically over the last year, maybe two. Consider this an apology, but as I mused on an explanation, I began to wonder whether it’s entirely my fault.
Certainly you might think that The World At Large makes it hard to be funny, but I don’t think that’s it. Watch enthusiasm is still a bubble, even when war and tariffs intrude, and the luxury industry could teach the Titanic’s string quartet a thing or two about carrying on regardless.
I should say, by the way, that I also know the danger of describing yourself as funny. It’s worryingly vain territory at the best of times, and I would never presume to label myself as anything other than a straight-down-the-line journalist. But sometimes, I might dare to suggest, I have my moments.
Partly, I have felt The Fourth Wheel growing up. What began as an unfiltered stream of reactions to the events of the past week has become something a bit more polished - or at least, something a bit more varied. I don’t think I could have sustained that for ever; you would find yourself inhabiting a persona, forced to constantly rail against everything, and that’s both exhausting and insincere. As a result, I’ve had to let a few tempting takes pass me by, and that’s probably been to everyone’s ultimate benefit.
But mostly, the problem lies with the target material. It’s not me, it’s you, watch world.
