This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.
It’s Hot Take Month here on Box + Papers, with a new guest writer dropping by each Friday to deliver their spiciest watch opinion. This week, we’re joined by Bilal Khan, a longtime watch journalist, current editor-in-chief at Teddy Baldassarre, and one of the most knowledgeable people writing about watches today. Every time I speak to Bilal about watches, I feel like I learn a dozen new things. This is his GQ debut! Please give him a warm welcome and follow him on Instagram here. —Cam Wolf
The watch world desperately needs more trolls.
I don’t mean more meme accounts or shitposters. I’m talking about the actual watchmakers—a group that includes some of the most self-serious, self-mythologizing companies on the planet—injecting a little more humor and subversion into their products and marketing. I want watch designs that take the piss out of watch culture, that hold a funhouse mirror up to the pretension and inanity this community so often engenders.
Meanwhile, thanks to Donald Trump’s tariff war with Switzerland (and the rest of the planet), the watch world has also been pulled into the political realm of late. Swatch attempted to make light of the situation with its recent What If…Tariffs timepiece, which reversed the “3” and “9” hour markers as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the president’s 39-percent levy against Switzerland. Right idea, but lacking the necessary bite to make any real noise.
The sad truth is that these tariffs coupled with the, uh, rather familiar designs of the ever-expanding roster of Trump Watches is a better troll job than anything Swatch could muster. And the joke isn’t on the Donald.
The true golden age of subversive creativity in watches took place between 2015 and 2020. We had Konstantin Chaykin’s Joker, a novelty watch that was met with sneers for its $7,000 price tag. Well, those now go for about $35,000 on the secondary market. And then there was the Richard Mille Bon Bon collection from 2019. These cupcake-, candy-, and marshmallow-themed watches baffled a vast majority of the public. Just peek at the comment section on this Hodinkee article for proof.
But the true masters of trolling the watch industry are the folks at H. Moser & Cie. In 2015, the independent maker began to spoof the industry through a series of audacious products and marketing campaigns.
