The Fourth Wheel, Issue 68

Blancpain joins the Horological Swatch-iverse

Hello and welcome back to the Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that has got a bone to pick with the Swatch press department. Why? Because I had been highly organised and written this week’s newsletter on Wednesday, from the perspective that the Blancpain x Swatch collab would remain under wraps until Saturday. Then that night, the press release went out and everything I had written was overtaken by events. So what you have here is part side-eye reaction to the build-up, part hastily-assembled reaction to the watches themselves.

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Well, well, well. What shall I write about this week? I’m always pleased when The Fourth Wheel returns to its original mission statement of reacting to the week’s news, but it’s a pain when something like this steams in and blows everything else off the agenda. For one thing, as you’ll see at the bottom of the email, there were quite a few really cool proper watches released this week.

Here’s the advert that sent everyone into a frenzy. Nearly everyone knew absolutely nothing; the few journalists that had been invited to a sneak preview had to pretend they didn’t know much. But that didn’t stop the tide of content spilling forth. Together, we sailed across the Sea of Ambiguity, through the Gulf of Ignorance, up the Rio Vague and over the Waterfall of Pageviews into the Lake of Saturation.

It is one of the horrible paradoxes of publishing. Media abhors a vacuum; readers around the world clearly wanted to know about this collaboration so every man, woman, and large language model leapt forward to cater to that demand, not letting the fact we have nothing to say impede us for one second. All the worst tendencies of YouTube creators come forth¹ - I’m looking at you, Escapement24, and so many like you. Here’s a five minute video in which I’ll exclusively reveal some teeny tiny scraps that really everyone already knows but not before I’ve captured your attention sufficiently for it to count towards my analytics. I feel dirty for watching it. There is a ‘right to be forgotten’ online - I wish there was a right to rescind your pageview, your valuable watching minutes. A button at the end of a YouTube video that you can tick to say ‘this was bullshit; I don’t want this view to be counted towards its performance. I want, in short, to unwatch it.’

Yes, here I am talking about the launch; yes, we are all being played, and my god, isn’t it unedifying. That Swatch Group - Swatch Group! Famously the clumsiest communicator, the least agile and exciting of the Big Luxury Players - is the one playing us so effectively should have alarm bells pinging all over the place. The contortions I have seen this week - remarkable. The number of hitherto silent Blancpain loyalists who would take a bullet for the esteemed maison’s reputation. The tiresome bores who can’t tell you quickly or loudly enough how little they care and how little they want one. The armchair consultants, split into two factions, both assuredly wrong for the single reason that nothing is ever that simple: one half convinced it will be a flop because Blancpain has none of the name recognition of Omega; the other half convinced it’s pure genius, guaranteed to catapult Blancpain to household name status by Monday. As I write, the watches still haven’t gone on sale; we have no idea if the drama will reach MoonSwatch levels², and as far as I know, Justin Hast has not taken his sleeping bag to Oxford St.