The automatic pieces like this one take Swatch timekeeping to the next level and often made casual Swatch wearers into hard-core collectors. Once you get hooked on the Swatch design, they throw a bunch of automatics at you. Check out a great review hereĪ pure example of Swatch’s ingenuity. Popular for a few years, the fad died out recently but it’s still hanging on in some corners of the nerd community.Īnother amazing automatic, this time with a chrono movement. In 1999 Hayek and Nicholas Negroponte created Internet Time, a universal time standard. This is not really a watch, but a movement. Why? Because Swatch could sell them to you. You could buy these little rubber things for your watch back in the 1980s. His whimsical watch now costs about $1000 online, a testament to the artist’s enduring popularity. Way back in 1985 a young artist named Keith Haring designed a Swatch watch, proving that art and commerce mix in delightful ways.
Never ones to ignore a lucrative partnership, Swatch was the first company to work with Microsoft on their SPOT technology. This one played a song by Jean Michel Jarre. They would play a tinny little tune by a famous musician.
#VINTAGE SWATCH SERIES#
The Musical series consists of some of the oddest watches Swatch ever released. Now you could wear a watch to the beach.ĩ. Before these Swatches (more here), watches were something you got at your Bar Mitzvah or your retirement. They made watches fashion items and brought new artists and designers to the fore.
While they’re not much to look at now, these watches changed the world. Here are ten of our favorite Swatch innovations: The iPod as an object of desire couldn’t have existed without the Swatch paving the way for inexpensive but highly designed objects to woo the consumer into regular purchases. The watches married high tech with high design and, given their fashion-forward nature, are the precursors to many of the design decisions made today by CE manufacturers. Artist and designers adorned the watches in odd patterns and the company brought the nascent Swatch Group, formed by Hayek in the early 1980s, to the forefront of Swiss watch manufacturing.Īt $20 or so, these watches were amazingly cheap and many collectors bought two at a time: one to wear and one to keep hidden away. Hayek saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a “throwaway” watch that could be worn for a season and then swapped with another model. Instead, they created a simple plastic quartz watch with a movement that contained only about sixty pieces instead of the 100-plus found in Japanese quartz movements at the time. Swatch was the brainchild of Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller in an attempt to make the thinnest wristwatch in the world. The Gent version starts at $70.In honor of the passing of Nicolas Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, we decided to wax a little nostalgic about his most breathtaking – and lucrative – product: the Swatch watch.
Check out the Swatch Clear Collection on. Now though, you can snag a new Swatch Jellyfish with the click of a button. It took me a good 6 months of searching and eBay notifications to find an NOS example with the original retailer tag still on it (a Marshall Field’s tag at that, catnip to a Chicagoan!). On most original examples, the clear case and band have aged to an absolutely disgusting yellow. Not for any horological feat, but just because it’s a cool object of the 80s. I do think the vintage Jellyfish is somewhat “collectible”, as are many of Swatch’s artist collabs - as much as any battery-powered piece of plastic can be, I suppose. In that ACM article John Goldberger himself also refers to Swatch as the “last great innovation in horology,” a sentiment from the great mechanical watch collector that I love.
#VINTAGE SWATCH SKIN#
There’s also a Clearly Skin, the Jellyfish form packaged up in Swatch’s super-thin classic Skin form.Īccording to A Collected Man, Swatch produced only 200 examples of that original limited-edition Jellyfish run. Sure, there’s also the Modern Gent (41mm) and the Big Bold (47mm), but to me a classic watch deserves a classic size. Even better, Swatch has one model in the original Gent size, a cool 34mm.
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