There is, if you haven’t already noticed, a highly competitive, Top Trumps element to the business of buying expensive watches. It’s not simply a matter of smothering a watch with bling, nor is it about jamming as many mind-bendingly intricate complications into a single piece. These will ramp up the price of a watch no doubt, but there’s a more complex alchemy involved when it comes to pushing the desirability of a watch into the outer limits of the ‘status-sphere’ and into the realms of pop cultural icon as recognisable as, say, a pair of Nike Air Jordans or a Picasso painting.
In the haute horological arena of combat, the title for the world’s most exclusive and desirable watch is a fiercely contested game of marketing strategy and hype. In 2022, the graili-est grail of all is the Patek Phillippe X Tiffany Nautilus 5711. This is the collabo di tutti collabo – an asset class watch whose price is shooting up to the moon and beyond, with one recently fetching $6m at auction, despite a retail price of $52,635.
Last weekend, Lebron James wore the watch at the biggest annual event in American sport, the Super Bowl, thereby further cementing the watch’s pop cultural credentials. Note how the watch looks tiny, almost like the woman’s model on Lebron’s huge frame, yet when Leonardo DiCaprio was spotted wearing one courtside at a Lakers NBA game, it looked how nature intended it to: a big masculine sports watch.
The power of this collab comes not from any new technical nor aesthetic innovations per se, because there’s no new movement and save for the turquoise blue dial, nothing has changed in the look of the watch. Just like a pair of Dior Jordans, its appeal comes entirely from the combined status of two powerful houses.
Tiffany, which was acquired by LVMH this year in a deal worth $16.2 billion, has been undergoing a major repositioning after Bernard Arnault installed his 29-year-old son, Alexandre, to be EVP of product and communications. His first major move was a killer one: to use Jay Z and Beyoncé in an ad-campaign in which they posed in front of a Basquiat painting wearing the brand’s jewellery.
Meanwhile, the legend of the Nautilus increased exponentially when the president of Patek Philippe, Thierry Stern, decided to discontinue the most sought after 5711 model in 2021. He declared the Tiffany version, of which only 170 are available (to commemorate the number of years the two companies have worked together), the 5711’s swan-song, and ‘a gift’ to the new management.
When it comes to watches, where Jigga man goes, the rest of celebrity firmament tend to follow. And lo, the ‘status-stician’ of rap was the first to be spotted wearing the distinctive turquoise dial which ‘pops’ in a picture as though it were luminous, at an LA screening of The Harder They Fall late last year. Jay-Z began the hype and Leo and Lebron have since escalated things, so it remains to be seen, who will be next to wear this powerplay of a timepiece? We shall see.
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