Wristwatches of that era were elegant and simple with a focus on one essential objective: an easy-to-read time. He especially loves the look and style of wristwatches from the 1950's and 60’s and it’s from this enthusiasm that we draw inspiration for this collection. Gilbert’s passion for vintage watches has never faded. His passion for restoring timepieces to the highest level began early and soon he became an expert in the repair and restoration of vintage watches. Gilbert started apprenticing as a watchmaker at the tender age of 16 and soon discovered a real passion for the craft, often choosing to skip summer holidays and work long night and weekend hours in order to hone his skills. We have named this collection: Gilbert "Vintage Watch Collection" in his honour.
Gudjonsson, who has over 50 years of experience in the field of watchmaking. Many images came from SwatchAndBeyond, a great Swatch resource.We are proud and excited to introduce our latest collection of watches dedicated to our master watchmaker, Gilbert O. Completely transparent except for parts of the movement, the Jelly line defined the playful lines and odd styling of the Swatch world. While a number of these watches appeared over the years, the Jelly is probably one of the oldest styles in the Swatch playbook. The automatic pieces like this one take Swatch timekeeping to the next level and often made casual Swatch wearers into hard-core collectors. Once you get hooked on the Swatch design, they throw a bunch of automatics at you. Check out a great review hereĪ pure example of Swatch’s ingenuity. Popular for a few years, the fad died out recently but it’s still hanging on in some corners of the nerd community.Īnother amazing automatic, this time with a chrono movement.
In 1999 Hayek and Nicholas Negroponte created Internet Time, a universal time standard. This is not really a watch, but a movement. Why? Because Swatch could sell them to you. You could buy these little rubber things for your watch back in the 1980s. His whimsical watch now costs about $1000 online, a testament to the artist’s enduring popularity. Way back in 1985 a young artist named Keith Haring designed a Swatch watch, proving that art and commerce mix in delightful ways. Never ones to ignore a lucrative partnership, Swatch was the first company to work with Microsoft on their SPOT technology. This one played a song by Jean Michel Jarre. They would play a tinny little tune by a famous musician.
#Vintage swatch series
The Musical series consists of some of the oddest watches Swatch ever released. Now you could wear a watch to the beach.ĩ. Before these Swatches (more here), watches were something you got at your Bar Mitzvah or your retirement. They made watches fashion items and brought new artists and designers to the fore. While they’re not much to look at now, these watches changed the world. Here are ten of our favorite Swatch innovations: The iPod as an object of desire couldn’t have existed without the Swatch paving the way for inexpensive but highly designed objects to woo the consumer into regular purchases. The watches married high tech with high design and, given their fashion-forward nature, are the precursors to many of the design decisions made today by CE manufacturers. Artist and designers adorned the watches in odd patterns and the company brought the nascent Swatch Group, formed by Hayek in the early 1980s, to the forefront of Swiss watch manufacturing.Īt $20 or so, these watches were amazingly cheap and many collectors bought two at a time: one to wear and one to keep hidden away. Hayek saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a “throwaway” watch that could be worn for a season and then swapped with another model. Instead, they created a simple plastic quartz watch with a movement that contained only about sixty pieces instead of the 100-plus found in Japanese quartz movements at the time. Swatch was the brainchild of Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller in an attempt to make the thinnest wristwatch in the world. In honor of the passing of Nicolas Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, we decided to wax a little nostalgic about his most breathtaking – and lucrative – product: the Swatch watch.
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