When it comes to luxury watches, the 1990s are back, baby!
It’s an observation likely to provoke a torrent of below-the-line abuse in watch nerd circles. But here we go: luxury watches as we know and love them owe their existence to a surprisingly modern confluence of circumstances. While the mechanics inside still tick to the tune of 200-year-old technology something happened in the decade that’s happening again: the 1990s.
As well as the skater kids and grunge, the 1990s represented a Gucci-clad boom for high luxe: collectors wanted rare treasures, City boys wanted status symbols and billboards needed supermodels.
“Despite the wave of newfangled electronics ravaging the Swiss craft, some brands could see that wouldn’t always be the case,” says Alexander Barter, once a director for Sotheby’s Watches and now co-owner of vintage boutique Black Bough. “There was no romance in circuitry, so they started to trade on the very defiance of that.
“Just look at Blancpain’s ‘We will never make a quartz watch’ campaign: it was getting pretty obvious that to sell to the burgeoning yuppy set, it had to be mechanical, lavish. By 1989, fine Swiss watches had become a status symbol and, literally, a hot commodity.”
The decade before, the only hope for a traditional watch industry laid to waste by the 1970s quartz revolution lay in a dumpy – albeit brilliant – consultant called Nicolas Hayek Sr. Helicoptered in by Switzerland’s big banks to scrape together various ailing concerns, Hayek conceived of the Swatch watch, whose fabulous – and, importantly, fashion-focused – success propped up its considerably pricier, historic stablemates.
Later renamed the Swatch Group, after the plastic-fantastic product that saved them all, Hayek birthed a dynasty of capos, steering household names including Omega, Longines and Breguet back into the black. The most famous is Jean-Claude Biver, who just before joining Omega in 1992 had sold Blancpain back to Swatch for 1,000 times what he’d paid in 1981.
Biver had taken a punt on a dormant name, desperate to stay afloat in a moribund industry. So desperate that only his electric charisma and a ‘Fully booked’ sign stolen from a Basel restaurant ensured he wasn’t laughed out of that year’s trade fair. He didn’t even have a single watch to show.
Nonetheless, under his brilliant slogan, “Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch,” Biver nurtured a quiet revolution, as well as the notion of the celebrity watch CEO. He signed Cindy Crawford to Omega in 1995, then went on to revitalise the cult experimentalist Hublot, inventing the tagline ‘The Art of Fusion’. Biver sold that brand too – to Bernard Arnault’s mighty LVMH, getting its logo onto every FIFA linesman’s number board.
From Hayek to Biver, the stage was set for the 1990s boom in bling-bling wrist candy. Admittedly, the notion of a ‘youthful’, ‘sporty luxe’ watch had been mooted in the 1970s by Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak. But it wasn’t till 1993 when this horological jetsetter would truly lift off (or perhaps weigh anchor), in the form of the beefed-up ‘Offshore’. An unheard-of 42mm-wide steroidal injection to an octagonal bracelet watch in (gasp) stainless steel, whose shock factor even earned the nickname ‘The Beast’ within AP’s own walls.
The mechanical watch was back, baby. It won Arnold Schwarzenegger himself’s endorsement, and it was the posterboy for Switzerland’s new era – not as gold retirement gift, but high-end fashion statement.
This was helped along by AP’s soon-to-be-CEO François-Henry Bennahmias, who was mixing with the edgiest and most brand-canny of the sports and music scenes, arguably coining the celeb’ status symbol we know today, from Rolex’s Daytona to Pharrell’s various Richard Milles.
Bennahmias famously “never gave a watch away”, he – with uncanny prescience for our influencer culture – simply got watches on the wrists of Jay-Z et al.
Fans wanted them, and now. Allocation became the new discount. A Swiss watch became a cipher, a totem. It’s how a Patek Philippe chronograph in S1E1 of Succession could form the fulcrum of Waystar RoyCo’s collapse, Tom Wambsgans gifting Logan Roy with the words, “It’s incredibly accurate: every time you read it it tells you how rich you are.”
“And then came the rise of the independent watchmaking scene,” continues Barter, “Something that brought unheard-of clout – to the watchmakers themselves, but also the wearers, who discovered a new way of showing off their knowledge and taste.”
Richard Mille’s creations certainly looked unlike anything before: stripped-back spaceships in miniature, which back in 1999 could only realised by indie whizzkids Giulio Papi and Dominique Renaud, who knew nothing other than hardcore horology.
Svend Andersen, a Danish-born master who cut his teeth in Patek Philippe’s complications ateliers had already co-founded the Académie Horlogère
Des Créateurs Indépendants (AHCI) in the early 1980s. It was he who unwittingly mentored another rockstar enfant terrible of Swiss watchmaking, Franck Muller. His eponymous enterprise coined the celeb-papped ‘it watch’ – chiefly thanks to his outrageously bulbous designs, which nonetheless contained extremely well-crafted movements.
“Once I was told, ‘You have a nose for discovering talents,’” Andersens says, “and my feeling about a promising young watchmaker named Franck Muller was good. Franck duly progressed to great things, almost singlehandedly re-establishing haute horlogerie as an innovative thing, as well as a fashionable thing.”
Sir Elton John considered him the ‘Picasso’ of watches, once telling GQ magazine, “Men’s watches were nice but they were boring. Suddenly Franck enabled men to go forward to more daring watches.”
Muller himself told Revolution magazine about a midnight epiphany in a swimming pool in Mauritius in 2001: “I thought to myself, ‘I hate rules. But… time itself is a rule. It is imposed on man. I want to create a watch that has no rules, but that always finds the right time regardless. And I will call this watch ‘Crazy Hours’.’”
The hours hand jumped 150 degrees every 60 minutes around a seemingly random dial display, the numerals were cartoonish, yet every red-carpet fashionista went loopy for it. The Franck Muller boutique in Mykonos town continues to do very well, thank you very much.
The custom of Greek shipping magnates and #influencers notwithstanding, respect for past masters still ticks at the heart of every Muller or every Mille, plus all the Patek Philippes, Piagets, APs and Panerais we’d forgotten about. It just took the 1990s to wind things back up.
Read more: Christopher Ward: Sales almost double at luxury watchmaker ahead of US expansion
Read more: Richard Mille: Luxury watch brand hands out huge pay day as sales success eyed