This Watch Comes With Rules. You Should Break Them.
Independent watchmaker Raymond Weil and subversive horological label Seconde/Seconde/ didn’t invent the rules. However, they have further entrenched them.
On the duo’s new Toccata watch is a series of instructions on how it should be worn. These don’t come in a useful pamphlet, but rather are printed directly onto the watch.
One half of the Toccota's watch face is darker than the other, indicating how much of it should be covered by a dress shirt's cuff. The other half of the watch face has a scale with markers outlining what the position of your cuff means, from hitting the sweet spot to going full-on formal.
It doesn’t end there, though. Flip this watch over, and there are more rules. On the back, the instructions read, “Never wind your watch while wearing it. Take it off first, then wind it in a dramatic fashion (ideally in the middle of a conversation).” This isn’t just a useful tip for those wanting to be dramatic, though: winding a watch while wearing it can damage it.
Seconde/Seconde/, whose previous projects have included a watch themed around death and another with a middle finger as a hand, is anything but a traditional watch label. And this Raymond Weil collaboration, released for $2,075, limited to 50 pieces, is typically tongue-in-cheek.
“Dress codes — the rules of elegance — are conventions worth knowing and respecting, but also ones we should never forget to play with. I therefore needed a distillation of this classic elegance, a pure ‘dress watch’ like the Toccata as my starting point,” said Romaric André, founder of Seconde/Seconde/. “A sort of essential raw material for carrying out my project, which aims to gently tease the very idea of ‘proper etiquette’.”
This watch might come with rules, but those rules are made to be broken.
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