The Clothed Body

Time
regulated by public convention, a measure that went perfectly with the rise
of modern individualism. Instead of depending on the church bells or the
cry of the sentinel, time began to depend on the individual, and the watch
began to mark the rhythms of daily life and to organize it. The wristwatch
appeared at the start of the twentieth century, when the male waistcoat,
with a pocket for the hob watch, began to go out of fashion. Women, too,
could wear watches on their wrist; having previously worn them as pendants
round their necks or set into rings, they could now use the watch as
a practical instrument, not just as a piece of jewellery.
There is, however, an inherent aesthetic value to the watch that goes
beyond its chronometric function, symptoms of which can be seen, for
example, in the initiatory role of the first watch in a child’s life, or in the
mania for collecting watches. The ingenious invention of the Swatch interprets
the peculiar status of the watch in the object system and has contributed
to opening up new frontiers within it.
Born simply as the Swiss watch, sold at a low price, but designed in an
eccentric and appealing way, often by famous artists, the Swatch became a
contemporary myth in little over a decade, a myth in which a sense of the
ephemeral and a passion for collecting are paradoxically combined. The
Swatch is a disposable object, made of resistant but inexpensive materials;
it continually changes colour and design. Yet it contains something both
unique and contradictory: it is a serial object that denies being one. If, on
the one hand, the Swatch is a consumer object that is changed as easily as
one’s clothes, and thus has ‘secularized’, so to speak, the sacred aura
around the measurement of time, on the other, its market laws have produced
an unusual form of collecting. Any model can be taken off the
market without warning and so become very rare and acquire an exorbitant
value. The mania for collecting as many as possible is fuelled by its
accessible price and titillated by the secret hope that one day the collector
could find her/himself the happy owner of an object of immense value, as
happened with the Kiki Picasso and Velvet Underground Swatch.
The history of the Swatch seems to bring together the histories of time,
fashion and collecting: it is an object that measures not only time, but also
style and, while born of the serial reproduction of the market, breaks its
rules, thereby gaining a place in the most famous auction houses and exhibitions
halls. Every Swatch owner feels not so much potentially rich as
similar to an art or antiques collector, whose wealth is symbolic. Tribes of
Swatchers queue outside shops and gather at exhibitions and publicity
shows; they read a specialized magazine and exchange catalogues with
price lists and collector’s items, like teenagers with football stickers. The
unusual form of collecting introduced by the Swatch, unlike that of
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