The Nautilus designed by Tiffany & Co. has come to us as an epiphany. And we talk about nothing else, it goes without saying. A commercial operation that becomes an epochal archetype of bad taste. Vulgar in the shameless speculative purposes, vulgar in the execution, which with that bluish patacca rapes the sober depth of the original Jumbo 3700/1, winking at the remade wives of some Russian oligarch more than Audrey Hepburn. But everyone will talk about it and already talk about it in Marian tones, as of an apparition of the Virgin, calling it "heavenly", "miraculous", "dreamlike".
The dream of a world where everyone dreams the same thing because everyone dreams. We live masked and syringed by a conformism so oppressive that it almost makes us want to voluntary quarantine. Society organizes itself on the tendency to imitate, said Jung or someone who had studied people's heads. And if vulgarity is the full luxuriance of conformism, upstart watchmaking is the full luxuriance of vulgarity, where everyone wants the same thing without knowing why and are willing to pay it 50 times its already overestimated market price just to be able to flaunt it. .
Now, I don't like playing the part of the fundamentalist purist with the stink under my nose. There are marketing operations where one perceives the flicker of the idea and one does not feel less women or less men by letting oneself be fooled. Not everything that is done to sell is sloppy or vulgar. Adorno would have written that freedom is not in choosing between a champagne or argenté dial, but in avoiding this prescribed choice. However, when there are the ingenuity of beauty and the beauty of ingenuity, even reification becomes bearable, even compelling. But when it comes to 'status watch', by now the tendency to imitation is so all-encompassing as to not let the idea breathe and the more cheap a thing is, the more it is recognizable even by those who do not understand anything about the subject, the more commercially successful it becomes.
Of course, at the beginning there is often the vitalistic impulse of intuition. That of Genta, in this case. And there is the exquisite manufacturing creation, that of Patek Philippe, in this case. But the use made of it today is reprehensible. You take that inheritance to squeeze it, to milk it, you squeeze the udders without regard until you get drops of profit. That said, there would be nothing Luciferian about pampering the bad taste and imitative instincts of the crowd for profit, if one had at least the decency to admit it. But no! The devil wears Tiffany.
But how do you act in these cases? With Phoenician merchant tactics and hypocrisy. When you realize that people crave your product, instead of making it in the right quantities to meet the demands, you reduce production, stirring up the demand. Very ready to complain about the speculation that will accompany those products of yours and indignantly claiming that you do not make watches to show at the cocktail bar, but haute horology for connoisseurs. Speculation that you could instantly eliminate by increasing that production that you had voluntarily limited. And when you want to thrill the fanciest fashion market, you will take that watch that everyone wants and you will announce its withdrawal from the market. Nonetheless, while you're announcing it, you'll be releasing a latest edition, to color the orgasm of beta customers and the snow of the speculative avalanche green in trendy green.
Finally, after the last reprint of what you announced you wanted to remove from the market, you will drop the special edition in collaboration with a brand that like few others tickles "aspirational" fantasies and with which Patek Philippe has been collaborating for 170 years, that is, from well before your arrival. Thus, 170 customers who are passionate about haute horlogerie as I am about sustainability, will consume a satisfaction at Tiffany's, while the fake aficionados will indulge in fetishistic auto-eroticism imagining that they have one on their wrist or in a safety deposit box. In the meantime, the prices of the blue sportsman will exceed in trumpet those of a 5204R, a sumptuous variation on the theme of the rattrapante chronograph with perpetual calendar 5004, a reference in itself difficult to improve.
This is the end - perhaps - of the Nautilus 5711 submarine watch: a commercial triumph; a shipwreck of epochal style.
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